Oolite Bulletins

Folks, I am currently in the process of evaluating how much work this port is going to be. I am having a few difficulties though and if anyone here who has a Pi could help it would be greatly appreciated.

I have posted on the main Raspberry Pi forum here. Take a look and see what you think. It’s basically a problem building spidermonkey on the Pi and also a problem with me being unsure where to edit the necessary makefile files.
Dave

I have a RPI. and almost no free time. I think I have booted it twice.

submersible wrote:

I have a RPI. and almost no free time. I think I have booted it twice.

+1 on that.

!m!

Hi davespice
Thanks for looking in to getting this to run on the pi. I'm not sure how much use I'll be as I'm totally linux illiterate but I'll see if I can be of any help with it

As a general point I was thinking about how much memory oolite needs and if it'll actually be useable on a pi - I currently use a win7 laptop that claims that it's using around 450meg to 500 of ram with the game at the spinning cobra screen & approx 640meg during play (everything turned up on an i7-2670, 8g memory, intel HD3000 graphics) . I appreciate that the level of detail, o.s. etc all have an impact upon the memory required however do you think that it is likley that it'll ever be able to run well on a pi?

I have a version 1 pi with 256meg of memory and always found raspbian pretty sluggish - it generally runs riscos unless webcams are required - so my concern is that it'll turn oolite in to a slideshow (This is a good excuse to get a new 512mb pi, though )

Cheers again for your work on this

Looking at getting an RP myself, once my housing situation stabilises..

Thanks for the encouragement folks. It seems that this is very much a pioneering exercise and I am making very slow progress. Spidermonkey (an Oolite dependency) is still the main sticking point as it appears that no one has actually attempted to build this on Arm before. I’m also trying to juggle my day job and another RPi hardware project so don’t anyone hold their breath just yet.

Good news though is that a Raspberry Pi version of Minecraft was demonstrated at Minecon in Paris this weekend just gone. Which probably shows that there is certainly enough grunt there to run Oolite.



With regards to memory footprint, that is just going to have to be a suck it and see. I presume most of you are looking at Oolite’s memory using Windows Task Manager and this is well known to give you a misleading value in terms of what numbers it’s showing. If you Google around a bit you can find some good explanations, here is one; http://getgreenshot.org/2010/07/24/a-fe ... rking-set/

So my point is that it probably won’t need as much memory as Task Manager thinks it does.

Encouraging news indeed.. hang in there, Commander!

Cheers for the confirmation about the memory and the link to the explaination about task manager.... that'll teach me for blindly beleiving windows without any research!

Good luck with this and well done on your work so far- I'm just sorry I can't be any more help at this stage.

This may be interesting to some of you.

Davespice wrote:

This may be interesting to some of you.

Tasty. Davespice - have you attempted a build on raspbian yet?

submersible wrote:

Tasty. Davespice - have you attempted a build on raspbian yet?

I have. Although spidermonkey is preventing me from making any progress.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... 3&p=231959

If you have any suggestions they would be greatly appreciated.

Davespice wrote:

submersible wrote:

Tasty. Davespice - have you attempted a build on raspbian yet?

I have. Although spidermonkey is preventing me from making any progress.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... 3&p=231959

If you have any suggestions they would be greatly appreciated.

Ok - my first suggestion would be to try a release branch and not trunk. Second - have you tried this using dpkg-buildpackage?

EDIT: Further - expect you're still going to collide with the inevitable OPENGL ES problem , that is - the way oolite works now requires big changes to work at all with this different specification.

I've posted on your 'other' thread and I am willing to help out where I can. I'll need a couple of pointers on how to get to the point where I can compile. I've got a second (new) model b as an xmas pressie with hopefully a PiNut bundle.
Will I have to compile under linux? Ultimately I'd like to get it running under riscos, but both platforms have the OPEN GL ES issue to deal with.

<first post. please be gentle>

I'm also happy to help out where I can. I've got a couple of 256Mb Pis at the mo - one RISC OS, one Raspbian. Happy to get another 512Mb version as well if it will help. Here's the thing though - I'm not much of a programmer. I can kind of bodge around here and there and compile stuff, but I'm not a Real Programmer. Like I say though, I love Elite and Oolite, and have played both for many many hours. Putting something back into the project seems fitting. I'm good at breaking things, if that helps at all.

Incidentally, I've got Elite:New Kind running on Raspbian already. It's pretty straightforward if you've got the source, but there's something funky going on with the sun being destroyed whenever you jump to a new system. Runs very nicely though, and once I'd kludged my way around that problem, I'm having great fun playing it again. I've looked at compiling this for RISC OS, but a couple of things stand in the way at the moment. Firstly the version of gcc available for RISC OS is donkeys years old (4.1) and doesn't support VFP floating point operations. Secondly, the linux version uses the allegro libraries, which aren't available on RISC OS, and I don't know enough about programming to re-code them using whatever tools are available. I daren't even look at compiling it using the RISC OS DDE version of C. I've got that installed, but haven't progressed much beyond "hello world" yet. Told you I wasn't much of a programmer.

Welcome aboard, nr.!

And yes, we can always use people who are good at breaking things!