0ad a24, a guilty challenge

Wow !, 2 years without writing anything here.

Well, time goes by, and the most surprising thing is that the topic of this post is about software and video games.

0ad, for those who do not know it, is a real-time strategy game, a genre of games that achieved its greatest popularity and consolidation in the 2000’s, with simple, but very appealing 3D graphics.

The most popular games of this genre were Age of Empires from Microsoft and Starcraft from Blizzard, these two titles owned thousands of hours and hours of entertainment.

0ad, is a very symbolic case since it is one of the best games based on free and open software and its artistic content under a Creative Commons license, and developed by a small group of developers under a community model, I would like to think, being a living example of a final product with high quality, although mostly without the attention it deserves.

All this would not have much importance, if it is not that the pandemic made us resort to old ways of entertainment, which thanks to its multiplayer model, allowed several contemporary friends to have a good time. Precisely, the Alpha 24 version was published not long ago, after just over 2 years of its predecessor a23 in December 2018.

New Release: 0 A.D. Alpha 24: Xšayāršā

Unfortunately this version 024 only had packages for Microsoft Windows, which is understandable when you take demographics into account and Microsoft Windows is still the most used operating system worldwide.

And although understandable, it is unfortunate that GNU / Linux users are out of the release of this new version.
Thanks to recent collaboration in the Trisquel project, I began to become familiar with the compilation of binaries and since I already had the infrastructure to compiling binaries, i decided to try compiling from source code.

Pleasantly this was much easier than it seems thanks to the community, so I hope it will be useful for others looking for how to use compile,

Trisquel 9.0 / Ubuntu 18.04

We will rely on the repository PPA of 0ad , to obtain the dependencies for the construction of the binaries,

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E4FA953A
echo "#0ad PPA repository
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/wfg/0ad/ubuntu bionic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/wfg/0ad/ubuntu bionic main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update

We install dependencies,

sudo apt-get -y build-dep 0ad
sudo apt-get -y install rustc cmake libfmt-dev

We download the code

git clone --depth 1 --branch A24 https://github.com/0ad/0ad

We start the compilation using all available threads,
Warning: This could leave the machine invested for this task only for several hours, so it is recommended to schedule the compilation in such a way that do not interrupt your activities.

cd 0ad/build/workspaces
./update-workspaces.sh -j"$(nproc --all)"
cd gcc
make -j"$(nproc --all)"

If everything goes well, we continue with the test

cd ../../..
binaries/system/test

If you get output like this,

Running cxxtest tests (351 tests)...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................OK!

Then, hurray!
Play time!

binaries/system/pyrogenesis

In any case, temporarily and until there are official binaries in the 0ad PPA repository, I leave these binaries available, and even though I hope they will be useful and entertaining, no guarantee is offered.

Binaries 0ad A24 – Trisquel 9 | Ubuntu 18.04,
http://ark.switnet.org/tmp/0ad-a24/

More information on building packages can be found on the official Wildfire Games wiki.
https: //trac.wildfiregames. com / wiki / BuildInstructions