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If it's true, you don't believ in the afterlife.
Arthur Kalliokoski
Second in Command
February 2005
avatar

As the instructions say, all you need is to unpack A5 to location of your choice, then

$mkdir build
$cd build
$cmake ..
$make
#make install

except that as an end-user distro (for consumers, not producers) quite a few libraries are missing by default.

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

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

except that as an end-user distro (for consumers, not producers) quite a few libraries are missing by default.

All of the developer files (headers, etc) will be missing assuming he hasn't installed any of the -dev packages.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

Gideon Weems
Member #3,925
October 2003

The article linked said:

sudo apt-get install libpng-dev libcurl4-nss-dev libfreetype6-dev libjpeg-dev libvorbis-dev libopenal-dev libphysfs-dev libgtk2.0-dev libasound-dev libpulse-dev libflac-dev libdumb1-dev

That's not enough?

Ariesnl, if you have a good tolerance for initial frustration, abandon Code::Blocks for vim and makefiles. The very foundations of Linux flow to this, and being closer to the metal makes a lot of things simpler (installations generally being one of them)... I'll stop pimping now. Have a safe New Year's, everyone.

furinkan
Member #10,271
October 2008
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I think you're still missing the documentation dependencies, and some optional stuff. ;D

I will say though, that daunting as this looks to noobs, make and vim have been around since the 70's. They got their shit figured out.

PS: this tread doesn't believe in the afterlife.

Neil Roy
Member #2,229
April 2002
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I still prefer Allegro for my 2D games. Allegro 5 was a great upgrade, but a few of the things that put me off of it and made it frustrating was building it. Specifically CMAKE. Sorry, but no matter how much it is touted as a great thing, I hate it. I was always able to build my own Allegro 4 in the past, Allegro 5 has a lot of dependancies which has hurt it, and you have to figure out how to build all or some of those (if you can find them), then try and build Allegro once you're done without errors (good luck with that). I only thank God there are people who can build binaries and release them for my compiler, and even they have been dying off it seems which means, I cannot use a newer version of MinGW because the latest binaries are for 4.7.1, so I am stuck at that (not that it matters that much to be honest). If a newer Allegro comes out, I can only hope someone takes the time to put up binaries. I already tried to compile it and was frustrated. Missing dependencies etc... etc... but I trudge on. Currently I have Allegro 5.0.10 installed with MinGW32 4.7.0 and have programmed a decent game (my Deluxe Pacman 1 game, still gets over 2000 downloads a week from one website I checked, and it is Allegro 4! I only wish I got $1 for each download, heheh).

Also, someone else nailed it about us all aging. I am about to turn 50 and I started programming with Allegro 2 I think it was when I was around 30 I think. Since then I have diabetes, my eye sight went from perfect to crap. The programming bug that infected me since the early 1980s seems to be vanishing. I guess I just miss the days of the 1990s and earlier, modern programming just seems to have sucked the fun out of it, for me anyhow.

I'm trying to get back into it. Certain online games (WoW) took up a few years of my time, but they are boring anymore. Maybe we'll get more people back now that the MMO fad is (hopefully) fading. ;) I know I want to do more programming, but my patience isn't what it used to be.

I am VERY thankful for all the work all of the Allegro maintainers have put into it over the years, no matter what happens I fully understand if people get tired of working on it.

Now I just need a time machine so I can go back to the 1990s, that was probably the most fun for me programming with Allegro for DOS. :D

---
“I love you too.” - last words of Wanda Roy

jmasterx
Member #11,410
October 2009

NiteHackr said:

modern programming just seems to have sucked the fun out of it, for me anyhow.

I'm quite young, but I certainly agree with this. It's fun to just make a simple Tetris in C or something simple. I miss software that did one thing and did it well.

These days if you are going to make a serious game, expectations are quite high.

Even for say a Pac-Man game on the App Store. You're going to at least need in-app purchases, and most games should work online, and do a lot more than just one thing like stack blocks and make lines.

Then you basically have no choice but to program properly which kind of takes the fun out of it. Dealing with events, design patterns, working with lots and lots of libraries, etc is not really that fun, for me at least. I don't enjoy programming nearly as much as when I started with Allegro 4.2 over 5 years ago.

Most of my projects with 4.2 only depended on A4 and were only a few files in size. Now my biggest project has over 250 classes, uses A5.1x and a couple other libraries, and I'm still planning how I will port it to OSX, Linux, ios and Android.

I wish I had been born in the time where working software was all that was required. Now software has to do everything while being the most maintainable codebase on the planet. Or you're fired >:(

Arthur Kalliokoski
Second in Command
February 2005
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jmasterx said:

I wish I had been born in the time where working software was all that was required. Now software has to do everything while being the most maintainable codebase on the planet. Or you're fired >:(

Sure, the old stuff seems easy now, but back then it was about as difficult to achieve. It was difficult to get compilers, paint programs and documentation without the internet, and the few that existed were buggy and hard to use.

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

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

NiteHackr said:

Allegro 5 has a lot of dependancies which has hurt it

The only non optional dependencies A5 has over A4 is OpenGL or D3D. The rest you can get away with not caring about as you could with A4 (how many people actually bothered to install libpng and loadpng? A5 just comes with an image loading addon that supports jpeg and png, where as A4 supported neither in a convenient way)

CMake isn't the best, but its miles better to support than autocrap.

jmasterx said:

design patterns, working with lots and lots of libraries, etc is not really that fun

That is all optional. you don't need lots of libraries other than allegro and D3D/OpenGL, and the only one you need to interface with is Allegro itself.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

jmasterx
Member #11,410
October 2009

That is all optional. you don't need lots of libraries other than allegro and D3D/OpenGL, and the only one you need to interface with is Allegro itself.

What I meant is, to make a practical large project, you'll need more than just A5. You'll probably need an xml library, networking, gui, and several others depending on your project. And unlike writing something in C# or Java, C++ letting you do whatever you want results in some libraries not being const correct, and several other issues can come up which makes it tricky. For example, a gui library might not use std string, or might not use char*. This complicates things. Even with Allegro, while al_ustr is awesome, you sort of have to riddle your code with it if you use it and it makes it harder to port your game to another library or have your strings be compatible with another library. In .Net or Java this probably would not be an issue.

That is of course not Allegro's fault. I was talking in the general sense comparing back to simpler games of the 80s or 90s that would not need xml, networking, or gui and back then, if you just linked to A4, you could probably build a commercial game with just linking to A4.

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

jmasterx said:

if you just linked to A4, you could probably build a commercial game with just linking to A4.

sure, but you'd either have to do all of the other stuff yourself, or have a simple game.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730



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