[JeffR]

Hey guys!

We've been hard at work shifting through issues and PRs to get 3.8 completed.

One month was an aggressive turnaround, but we felt it was needed to avoid the "5-6 months late" thing that cropped up when trying to work through 3.7. That said, a glance at the github milestone indicates we're 2 weeks late.

So what gives?

Well, 3.8 had a relatively short list of active issues and PRs, but a big one was ironing out the major walls in Linux support. 3.7 introduced Linux support, but there was a lot of stuff that didn't get the testing it deserved, so while it functioned, there were a lot of cases where things would go awry. A lot of that has to do with how tricky it can be to juggle support for the various Linux distros, compared to Windows or OSX.

So we tried to target graphical issues, and also some niggling issues with SDL as the platform layer. Part of this is because in the future, we'd like to gut all the custom platform code and just have the platform code act as a wrapper to SDL with some additional helper functions. This would go a long way to make the codebase leaner, and less stuff that can go pearshaped because no one is remotely familiar with what the original writer was doing.

However, as we started pulling on those SDL threads, more and more frays began to crop up, which meant other things that needed to be fixed.

Happily though, as far as we've been able to tell, there's on a few remaining issues pertaining to utilizing SDL as a platform layer, and a few outstanding problems with what we've got mapped so far for current Linux support, meaning that we shouldn't see many new PRs go into the stack, and we can finish up whittling down the ones that are there while reaping the benefits of everything working much better than before.

So, to conclude the update, everything's moving along and wrap-up and an RC is impending.

A huge thank you for everyone that's helped out so far, especially Az and TMM who have spearheaded a lot of the "make Linux not a shambling horror" effort.

[Jason Campbell]

Wow, seems quick. Great news, especially ironing out some more of Linux. Thank you!

[koros]

All the hard work is definitely appreciated on this end!

Thank you.

[Azaezel]

Do suppose shambling horror to creeping terror is a bit of an upgrade, yeah.

Should note on that end that the cmake build route now supports sdl2+opengl on windows, which'll cut down on the crossplatform differences for folks a bit, though it could use a bit more review in terms of properly hooking into say, steamOS and using that dll/.so instead of genning it's own. Project generator still needs that converted.

On the openGL end, we found that mesa drivers in particular weren't terribly happy with the extensions detection, so started eyeballing 2 solutions. First, TMM seems to have found an environment variable we can check to short-circuit that for glew, second we'll be looking into replacing the glew bindings with libepoxy. TMMs agreed to take point on that with Luis's approval.

As a quality of life thing, will try and snag some time next week to look into the possibility of having warnings crop up in debug mode windows side for files accessed that violate case sensitivity since that's a complete non-starter for unix derivatives, but that end of things is a bit of a mess as well, so no guarantees.

As always, aint particularly territorial about any of this stuff, so if folks want to jump in, by all means, please do.

[rlranft]

Thanks guys! Keep on keepin' on. It's a thankless job, but know that we appreciate it.

[triggerfish]

Great news. I can't wait to get T3D up and running on my Linux system!

[Azaezel]

I can't wait to get T3D up and running on my Linux system!

Then don't. Development has most of the stuff rolled in, and reports on oversights for combos and configs are just as important as the code its self.

[triggerfish]

Then don't. Development has most of the stuff rolled in, and reports on oversights for combos and configs are just as important as the code its self.

I reported some problems I had in the 3.7 thread. buckmaster said that he really did not know what to tell me. I'll just wait till the newer version comes out to see if I have better luck with my system. I'm a beginner/hobbyist so I can wait. The devs work very hard and I don't want to annoy them!

[JeffR]

Then don't. Development has most of the stuff rolled in, and reports on oversights for combos and configs are just as important as the code its self.

I reported some problems I had in the 3.7 thread. buckmaster said that he really did not know what to tell me. I'll just wait till the newer version comes out to see if I have better luck with my system. I'm a beginner/hobbyist so I can wait. The devs work very hard and I don't want to annoy them!

Not sure what you're meaning here. Are you waiting on the precompiled binary?

Or do you mean you just don't want to spam us with a bunch of notices about how stuff is a bit janky/not working? If it's the latter, then you really don't need to worry about annoying us. One of the big reasons the Linux support was weak in 3.7 was because we didn't have many people that actually had it trying it out, so we had a total black hole of information on how it was doing on various distros and computer settings.

More information is NEVER a bad thing, so if you can, I'd really like you to grab the latest and give it a try.

[triggerfish]

Thanks, I'll be happy to try out the latest again. Please link me to it, and the most updated compiling instructions for Linux. I am not very experienced with compiling software, but buckmaster seemed to think that I did everything the last time correctly. If it will help you, I posted the error messages that I was receiving, and my system information to Pastebin. I posted a link to that information in the Torque 3D 3.7 Released thread. Here's that link:

Thanks buckmaster,

Here's the link to my console.log on pastebin:
http://pastebin.com/frTmXMBs

I was not able to post the entire thing as pastsbin said it was too big. The last messages just repeat thousands of times.

Do you need my system info? Here it is:
http://pastebin.com/GYuLdZ9A

Thanks for all your hard work!

I hope this help you guys. Thanks again