The Exploits of Plouj

Since I’m doing quite a bit of Java programming lately I’ve become curious about the state of writing concurrent code in it. I was fortunate enough to have a colleague let me borrow the following book:

Having gone through more than half of it already I’m rather surprised as to just how many different tools are available for solving concurrent problems and just how many are a instantly available to Java programmers. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, none of these tools in and of themselves are adequate enough for avoiding deadlocks and writing composable deadlock free code. My next step in the search for that silver bullet is to try writing something interesting in Clojure or Haskell using STM.

Introduction

In this post I’ll document the steps I had to take to build DXX-Rebirth (a modernized Descent game engine) for Windows using MSYS and MinGW.

MinGW, MSYS

From  Pantokrator’s blog:

• install MinGW
  • choose a lowercase install path: c:\mingw
  • choose to download and install current version
  • enable g++ (for physfs)
• install MSYS
• install msysDTK

SDL and SDL_mixer

Also from  Pantokrator’s blog:

• download the SDL source
• in the MSYS shell, compile it with

./configure --prefix=/mingw && make && make install

• download the SDL_mixer source and in a MSYS shell, build it with the same command:

./configure --prefix=/mingw && make && make install

PhysicsFS

• Download the physfs 1.1.0 source.

• Compile with the same command again:

./configure --prefix=/mingw && make && make install

SCons and Python

From Globulation2 MinGW instructions:

• install Python 2.6
• install SCons
• add:

PATH=$PATH:/c/Python26:/c/Python26/Scripts

• to the end of /etc/profile in MSYS so that SCons can run from the MSYS shell.

Subversion

• install TortoiseSVN

DXX-Rebirth

• checkout DXX-Rebirth from https://dxx-rebirth.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dxx-rebirth
• change the SConstruct script to call sdl-config as ‘sh sdl-config ‘:

...
Flags and stuff for all platforms...
env.ParseConfig('sh sdl-config --cflags')
env.ParseConfig('sh sdl-config --libs')
env.Append(CPPFLAGS = ['-Wall', '-funsigned-char'])
...

• finally, in the MSYS shell, built with:

scons sdlmixer=1

Final Remarks

I had trouble with the latest version of PhysicsFS (1.1.1) because it uses cmake. For some reason it failing to find some prerequisites in MSYS. I also had trouble with version 1.0.1 of PhysicsFS (this is the version the official d1x-rebirth_v0.55.1-win.zip is built with) because the built failed with the following error:

warning: cannot find entry symbol _DllMainCRTStartup@12; defaulting to 00401000
...
undefined reference to WinMain@16

If you notice any problems or mistakes in this post, please mention them in the comments.