[Nel] Getting NeL up and running.

[Leighton Haynes]

Hi Guys,
    Well, i finally managed to get the sample snowballs client and
    server up and running, though it required quite a few code hacks
    on my part. (Damn my wacky machine config). Oh yeah, this is all
    for the linux code as well.. my machine is basically debian woody
    (though various gnome/wine/sawfish things are latest releases
    compiled from source)

    Most of my 'fixes' aren't really, they address the symptoms rather
    than the cause, though I don't think I've broken anything major 
    with them ;) If anyone wants to give me some hints on what could
    be causing them, please do. 
    In case anyone else has similar problems, things I got were:
        time_service was exiting: temporarily fixed by removing the
          call of _Callback() in checkConfigFiles() method of 
          code/nel/src/misc/config_file/config_file.cpp. I haven't
          managed to work out where it's being set, or why the value
          isn't correct yet.
          I gather the point of the Callback function is so that the 
          client which has loaded the Config file can become aware 
          of any changes to the parameters in the file, the time_service
          doesn't appear to set any callbacks for this though. *shrug*
        moves_service - suspect it had the same problem as above, it
          _was_ segfaulting, but went away after the above hack.
        the client was exiting with a message in the logfile about 
          being unable to load file "data/". Managed to eventually track
          it down to some of the texture loading code in 
          code/nel/src/3d/landscape.cpp. The loading of the diffuse
          texturemap doesn't do a check for textName == "" though
          the loading of the alpha texture map does. Haven't worked 
          out yet why it's decided that the textName is "" (it's too
          late ;)). I modified the code to do a test for textName == ""
          and made it default to loading the CTextureCross texture.

    As some other comments - processes are defaulting under linux to
    some (IMHO) really ugly behaviour of 'fork'ing another process,
    the sole purpose of this appears to be to let them run in the 
    background. I don't see any really good reason for doing this,
    since it can be quite easily achieved by 'nohup'ing it and 
    shoving an '&' on the end of the line. Am I missing something?
    (It makes it a bugger to debug, I can't run 'strace' on them effectively
    etc etc. Obviously, i just commented the code out of my version ;)
    Perhaps a commandline switch would be more appropriate?)

    Oh well, after all that, the client runs at about 5fps ;) Guess
    I should spend some time seeing if I can get it faster eh?
    Can anyone give me some benchmarkish figures for framerate 
    under window~1? For a P3-550 with Geforce(1) would be best ;)
    Then I can have a base to work from.

    Anyhow, nice work guys. The framework (which I've forcibly had
    to poke) seems pretty decent (I'm reserving judgement for further
    praise until I've had more experience with it ;)). Having spent
    some time working on one of these, I know just how much work it
    is to get anything this complex working. 

    
Leighton...

--

Part-time student. Full-time Programmer. 
Seeking the 36 hour day and the 10 hour working week.
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