yquake2remaster/doc/05_packaging.md

Notes for Package Maintainers

This guide shows how Yamagi Quake II should be packaged and what assumptions the games makes regarding binary and game data locations.

This guide uses the notation for unixoid platforms. Executables have no file extensions and libraries are given with the .so extension. MacOS and Windows behave exactly the same way, but with the platform specific file extensions.

The Executables

Yamagi Quake II expects all binaries (executables and libraries) to be in the same directory or, in the case of game.so, in the mod-specific subdirectory.

So the binary directory should look somehow like this:

• /path/to/yamagi-quake2/
  • quake2
  • q2ded
  • ref_gl1.so
  • ref_gl3.so
  • baseq2/
    • game.so
  • xatrix/
    • game.so
  • ... (the same for other addons)

Yamagi Quake2 will get the directory the quake2 executable is in from the system and then look in that directory (and nowhere else!) for the ref_*.so renderer libraries. It will look for game.so there first, but if it's not found in the binary directory, it will look for it in all directories that are also searched for game data. This is for better compatibility with mods that might ship their own game.so.

You can just symlink the executables to a directory into the $PATH, like /usr/bin/. There's one exception to this rule: OpenBSD does not provide a way to get the executable path, so a wrapper script is needed.

We want all binaries to be in the same directory to ensure that people don't accidentally update only parts of their Yamagi Quake II installation, so they'd end up with a new quake2 executable and old renderer libraries (ref_*.so) and report weird bugs.

The SYSTEMWIDE and SYSTEMDIR options

The Makefile allows to enable the SYSTEMWIDE feature to force Yamagi Quake II to search the game data in an system specific directory. That directory can be given in the Makefile. If no directory is given the game defaults to /usr/share/games/quake2/ which should be correct for most Linux distributions.

The SYSTEMDIR is meant to contain only the game data and not the binaries. It allows several Quake2 source ports to share the same game data.

Alternative startup config

Yamagi Quake II has support for an alternative startup config. That config overrides some global values with sane defaults. It may be a good idea to install it. Copy yq2.cfg to the baseq2/ subdirectory in the gamedata directory.