Cube boot CD

by why wont it let me log in??? on 08/22/2004 05:51, 26 messages, last message: 12/20/2004 20:18, 6932 views, last view: 05/05/2024 04:40

Hey!

I had an idea. A while ago, i heard that America's Army had a boot CD version of their game in Linux. You would just go to the lan party, and everybody would boot their PC's from the CDs.

This was also handy for people who didn't wany to install it on their computer, or didn't have the 200 Mb left on their HD because of all the other games they had.

I am not a coder, but it doesn't seem veyr hard to make a linux boot CD. As a matter of fact, you don't need to make one, just add Cune to the .iso of an existing one...

What do you guys think? you could have a Cube Boot CD, in well under 50 MB, which is conveniently small enough to fit on one of those silly little business card CD-R's.

Also, one could make a Linux boot CD, but also include Cube in a folder in the main section of the CD, not compressed like the rest of it. Then, if the people were adventurous, they could run it in windows without re-booting.

My first experience with cube was from a cd, my only suggestion is that before you play a match, you walk all the way around the level first, making sure it is copmletely loaded into RAM. Then playing it becomes just like playing from the HD.

What do you guys think?

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#7: ..

by staffy99 on 08/24/2004 13:04

could you chuck this http://www.morphix.org/modules/sections/index.php?op=viewarticle&artid=15

and cube together and then delete all of the useless stuff?

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#8: ..

by innovati on 08/24/2004 20:48

oh, I know it IS possible with gentoo. It's possible with anything, icluding your ownn custom Linux build, right formt he kernel up. It' possible.

But, Knoppix is the leader, and many many liveCD's are made fomr it.

I have no clue why, but Gentoo seems to be the leader in Linux gaming, even though they all run the exact same games...

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#9: Re: ..

by D.plomat on 08/28/2004 00:58, refers to #8

Gentoo and Debian are the two best distros and leaders in every domain. Probably because they are the only ones providing easy package management with nearly perpetual upgradability and no dependencies hell. Except for commercial applications where their vendor certify them only for X.X version of RedHat and IT staffs won't take the risk to see 'if this XXXXX$ app might run correctly on another distro.

On those two distros, installing source packages is very easy, and they are very up to date on libraries (that makes a great difference compared to trying to compile some very recent games on a 1yr old RPM based distro and playing with upgrading RPMs). So i think the two viable options for a Linux hardcore gamer are Gentoo and Sid.

Maybe most gamers aren't techs so the word 'unstable' can afraid them, and they are also attracted by the little % of performance given by compiled source, even if that doesn't make a difference for games because the share of CPU cycles in the libs isn't very much for 3D apps, as all happens in the game engine itself and the OpenGL drivers... In fact i think many people chose Gentoo for this hypothetical little performance gain, which is the worst argument to choose it and nothing more than an anecdotic side effect of source-compiling. Also if it wasn't for fun and knowing a bit more how it works, i wouldn't have bothered with the huges compiles, simply installed the precompiled GRP version of Gentoo and recompiled the 5-10 packages/libs for which the default compile-time options doesn't suits what i want to do/interoperate.

I know very few Debian but i think those 2 are exactly as adapted for gamers. I'm very satisfied of Gentoo (in fact the first distro that gives me full satisfaction) and probably i'll also be very satisfied of Debian when i'll test it too.

IMHO the best distro is LFS but no one have time for that ;)

About the live CD, i checked a bit Catalyst, Gentoo system for making live CD's and i find it not enough straightforward, i think i'd find it easier making an LFS one, so probably Knoppix is much more mature and adapted.

Tested Knoppix and sure it rocks, but it's more a complete distro than a one-purpose tiny distro.

The thing that gave us the idea of a Cube live CD was Damn Small Linux, a credit-card bootable CD based on Knoppix. Probably the best thing to start from, except that we have to make a full recompile+repackage of the X server with DRI and scripts etc, but probaly adding this will fit in the available space.

If this project gets real, i think that the tool chosen will only be the favourite one of the one who makes it and/or the one closer to the goal of a bootable Cube CD.

Didn't knew this Morphix thing. Will give it a try, if it really has a robust autodetection of 3D hardware it's probably a good thing to start from. Then to check if it can really be reduced to the point that it + Cube will fit in 200Mb.

Or at least to take appropriate parts from each of those systems, looks like all of them has some aspects we're looking for, but noone really fits.

In fact all we need is:
-recent kernel
-minimal shell (busybox?)
-GLibc
-other libs required for Cube
-autodetection scripts to load the modules and generate the XF86Config
-X Server with GLX,DRI,modules for many types of hardware
-ALSA sound

Or better, some system to package the whole thing while keeping te dependencies to the strict minimum.
I dont think Gentoo Catalyst is appropriate/can build a system with a minimal environment.

For Knoppix, searched a bit and found this:
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12261&highlight=

...as they say: "It is still experimental and won't install X"

but looks very promising, i read the whole thread, probably when they'll have it working with basic X, it'll just be a matter of adding some commands after the
apt-get install x-window-system-core...
to add the modules for various cards and the script for the XF86Config auto-generation

Well if they get that close to the goal, indeed Intellibuild will be that tool :)

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#10: date?

by innovati on 08/28/2004 15:46

Yeah, I don't care what they said in MARCH! That was a long time ago for a project like Knoppix, and by the way, were they talking about the stab;e release, or the unstable one?

I have used about 4 bootCD's made from Knoppix (not knoppix itself), one of which was only 34 MB. This was enough to put you into Blackbox, with things like AbiWord and such. I would like you to reconsider your thoughts on Knoppix, all one would have to do really, is add Cube to the .iso and burn, mind you, it wouldn't put it on the desktop or anything...

Is there a way you can open an iso and make changes to it, then save it again, I'm talking like, run the OS, make some shortcuts, Cube wallpaper, that kind of thing, then save it again?

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#11: I think there is even no need for a desktop

by D.plomat on 08/28/2004 16:27

even if blackbox or IceWM are very light...

Cube itself is the only and first thing launched by the X server.

Off course we might need to add a minimal desktop if we want to give things like some OS configuration menus

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#12: yes

by innovati on 08/29/2004 02:28

You're right, like maybe have the graphics card/monitor configuration window autostart when they log in. Then, the only other icons on the desktop would be a link to this here site, a shortcut to cube, and the config menu. It could work.

Also, what you might wanna consider would be a sound mixer, so they can test and adjust their volume before entering the game.

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#13: Re: yes

by D.plomat on 08/29/2004 14:30, refers to #12

About the autodetect script, i tested the Morphix and it does a pretty good job on a GeForce to detect and enable the nvidia module. Later will test it with a Radeon and an Intel card to test if it has wide support. For the resolution, it would be cool to have just before starting Cube, some app to only set the resolution and #colors. The ideal thing would be to have all (and minimal) configuration in only one screen, and a big button "Launch Cube" on the bottom right of the screen :)

About the sound, i think the minimalist and simplest solution is setting it to the max (or 80%) at startup with alsamixer and then use Cube's internal commands soundvolume and musicvolume to let the user adjust. Or eventually if we have a config screen, have a Cube ogg playing on the background and a volume slider.

Coding this config screen isn't very hard, if i manage to have an adapted 200Mb bootable CD (first test will of course be fixed resolution, colordepth and volume), then i'll add this config screen.

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#14: Another option

by EnragedTux on 08/29/2004 17:46, refers to #13

ANother option for you to look into is Morphix. It was created to be a more configurable version of Knoppix.

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#15: Re: Another option

by D.plomat on 08/29/2004 19:19, refers to #14

I've already checked a Morphix version specially designed for games. Will test a bit more the video hardware auto-detection but i think we'll use this one.

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#16: ..

by why wont it let me log in??? on 08/30/2004 07:06

mmm, getting the Nvidia drivers is the easy part, Nvidia releases linux drivers. The hard part will be getting ATI drivers. As much as i like ATI, they sure are dumb when it comes to Linux drivers...

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#17: Re: ..

by pushplay on 08/31/2004 01:46, refers to #16

Don't confuse dumb with just ignoring a niche market.

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#18: New KNOPPIX-Live CD with CUBE!

by kmaus on 12/15/2004 23:48

Have a look at this page:
This is a full CD with KNOPPIX-Live CD and a pack full of games - inclusive Cube!

http://games-knoppix.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/

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#19: Re: New KNOPPIX-Live CD with CUBE!

by Grogan on 12/16/2004 23:35, refers to #18

I downloaded and tried that last night, and I don't have Cube. I searched the entire filesystem and there's no evidence of it. Nor do they list cube as being included.

I can, however, mount one of my Linux filesystems and play cube while booted with that CD.

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#20: Re: ..

by Mephisto on 12/17/2004 11:53, refers to #17

@pushplay:
Since when is Linux is niche market? It has a bigger desktop share then Mac already, and its still growing.

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#21: Re: ..

by pushplay on 12/19/2004 03:05, refers to #20

Mac is also a niche market.

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#22: Re: ..

by Drakker_ on 12/19/2004 05:44, refers to #21

But together they represent roughly 10% of the market... and since both platforms have shared libraries, coding once for linux/mac osx is easy, now thats a bigger almost-not-niche-anymore market!

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#23: Niche markets but growing markets

by D.plomat on 12/19/2004 13:50

And since there are more and more portable libraries and common tools, we can excpect to have more and more software for those platforms, at least some software editors companies realize that by using those tools/libraries they can reach 10% more market, so they've no reason not doing so.

99% is still better than 90% :)

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#24: Re: ..

by pushplay on 12/19/2004 22:00, refers to #22

Making a free cross-platform game isn't the same as making a commercial cross-platform game. Some libraries you can make use of, but some are GPLed and are thus useless. Then there's support and testing, which represent a significant cost. Finally, any real linux gamer has a windows dual boot anyways.

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#25: Re: ..

by D.plomat on 12/20/2004 19:54, refers to #24

I don't think there is yet licensing problems as there was, as now most library teams made the wise decision of using the LGPL instead GPL, at least the two most used generic/multi-purpose, SDL and PLIB.
So that plus OpenGL (i don't know for OpenAL, but i suppose too) make for a portable complete games development environment suitable for both free and commercial games.

About Linux gamers, i don't pretend to be a real gamer nor a real free software user, since i don't mind missing some commercial titles because they were developped using DirectX, and i sometime also install commercial games on my Linux systems.

I just keep only one system for the sake of simplicity and avoiding the reboots annoyance, then all depends on if you define a linux gamer as a real linux user using mainly games, or a real gamer mainly using Linux ;)

About testing and support, i think that isn't negligible, but still on a large expert coders team that represents only some % compared to the whole development cost. Still the added market share they can gain is also only some %, looks like that's viable for the most known games like Quake/UT or medium audience like RTCW, but on less known games the only way they get ported to Linux is by specialized companies like Loki/Hyperion, but most often the port cost is because they're using DirectX.

So the essential question is if those portable libraries will become standards also in commercial games development.

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#26: SDL license

by D.plomat on 12/20/2004 20:18

http://www.libsdl.org/license.php

Basically they're making a quick description of what LGPL implies, but they'd emphasize more on the fact that there's no problem in writing a closed-source commercial game that uses them, as long as it uses dynamic linking.

Reading this quickly and 1. is probably where a manager of a commercial game development team exclude SDL if they don't already knows the LGPL

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