[A4, Linux] Bundling A4's audio .so files with game

[A4, Linux] Bundling A4's audio .so files with game

SimonN

Member #8,272

January 2007

Hi,

I want to bundle the shared objects of Allegro 4.2 or 4.4 with a game, so people don't have to install the lib to their system first. (Static linking doesn't solve the problem, see last paragraph.)

I made fine progress with liballeg-4.2.2.so respective its symlink liballeg.so.4.2. I put those in ./bin/lib, with . being the game's root directory, and linked like so:
ld -L./bin/lib -lalleg-4.2.2 -Wl,-rpath,./bin/lib *.o

The game finds the lib at runtime, plays normally, but sound will not work. Apparently, I also need the shared objects usually installed in /usr/lib/allegro/4.2.2, i.e. things like alleg-alsadigi.so, alleg-dga2.so, ..., modules.lst. I had no luck whatsoever with putting them in subdirectories of the game. Neither ./bin/lib/allegro/4.2.2 seemed to work, nor ./bin/lib, nor anything else.

ldd gameexecutable won't even display a need for these libs, unlike for the main A4 lib. Apparently Allegro does some magic in locating them, or just assumes a normal installation.

This also sheds light on (but not solves) this: If you build the static version of Allegro 4, link (statically) against it, and don't install any Allegro-related files into the system, sound will not work. Old topic with this issue: http://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/608589

-- Simon

Arthur Kalliokoski

Second in Command

February 2005

I just checked my system, and there are no static libraries for ALSA.

They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas.

SimonN

Member #8,272

January 2007

Same here, building the static liballeg.a will still make shared objects for ALSA etc.

The problem is how to place these shared objects in the game's tree.

-- Simon

Arthur Kalliokoski

Second in Command

February 2005

You might be able to do it if you recompile ALSA for a static library, but

Quote:

Due to bug in libtool script it is no longer possible to build shared and static libraries together.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/multimedia/alsa-lib.html

That's more work than I want to mess with.

They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas.

Peter Wang

Member #23

April 2000

Set the ALLEGRO_MODULES environment variable in a shell script then launch your executable.

SimonN

Member #8,272

January 2007

Peter Wang: Perfect, thanks! This did it.

I read your A4 source (src/unix/umodules.c) to get the exact details right. For other people who might want to do this:

1. Do everything I wrote in the original post. (Linking statically didn't work for some reason with steps 2 + 3 here.)
2. Put the contents of /usr/lib/allegro/4.2.2/ into a subdir of the game. I used (gamedir)/bin/lib/allegro/, but anything is fine. Make sure you take all the files, including modules.lst.
3. Run the game with this shellscript:

#!/bin/sh

if [ ! -e bin/gameexecutable ]; then
    echo "This script should be run from the game's root dir."
    exit
fi

export ALLEGRO_MODULES=bin/lib/allegro
bin/gameexecutable

Basically, make sure you point ALLEGRO_MODULES to the exact relative directory in which modules.lst resides.

-- Simon