This is the Quadra source release.
- a C++ compiler (gcc was tested on Linux and Visual C++ on Windows)
- zlib (http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/)
- libpng (http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html)
- SDL 2.0 (http://www.libsdl.org/)
- Boost::System and Boost::Filesystem libraries
On Ubuntu, the following packages are needed to build:
- make
- g++
- libsdl2-dev
- libpng12-dev
- libboost-dev
- libboost-filesystem-dev
Some users have expressed privacy and performance concerns about the auto-update feature. This auto-update is implemented by fetching a small file using HTTP, no more than once per day. The information sent to the server is very limited: your IP address (from the connection itself) and the Quadra version you are currently using (from the HTTP User-Agent header). At the time of this writing, the Quadra team does not even have access to the logs where this information is stored (this file is hosted by Google Code). In the interest of full disclosure, similar information is sent to Qserv when using the Internet multi-player mode, with a few more technical informations (such as the platform and the display driver in use), and this information is accessible by the Quadra team (not used for anything at the moment, but could be used to gauge the interest for support of specific platforms). We will not release the specifics of any information collected, only aggregate (for example, the percentages of users using Linux or Mac OS X), if ever.
This auto-update feature serves two purposes. One is to inform the user of new versions of Quadra, which might have important security or bug fixes. The other is to get the URL to use as the default Qserv address. The latter is so that we have some flexibility in moving Qserv (which has been a problem in the past, with downtime for Internet players). Fetching this file is done in the background, and does not delay starting up the game.
Packagers which provide automatic updating (such as Ubuntu and openSUSE) can disable the new version notification (with the --disable-version-check configure option), as it would be redundant and unhelpful to the user. Note that this does NOT disable fetching the file, as it is still necessary for obtaining the Qserv address.
To compile and install this software on a Unix-like system, do this:
If you checked out the source code from GitHub (if not, you can skip this step):
$ autoreconf -i
And then the traditional build procedure:
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install (optional)
There you go! There is a 'quadra' binary and a 'quadra.res' resource file in the top-level directory. If not, then something went wrong. :-)
You can run this with the following command (in bash):
QUADRADIR=. ./quadra
If you ran the make install command, then you have 'quadra'
installed on your system and you can just run it (no need to
set QUADRADIR).
To compile Quadra on a Windows machine, use the Visual C++ workspace
and project file in the VisualC++ subdirectory. Make sure you have
zlib, libpng and DirectX (August 2007 SDK or earlier) properly installed
for development on your machine. Run res.bat after building to
create the resource file (quadra.res).
A common problem on Mac OS X is that the libpng library is not available. This
is relatively easy to work around, by downloading the libpng sources (available
at http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html), compiling them (no need to
install it on your system!) and then adding a CPPFLAGS=-I/path/to/libpng LDFLAGS=-LCPPFLAGS=-I/path/to/libpng/.libs to the configure command
line. It's possible that the LIBS variable will have to be adjusted in the
Makefile, depending on the libpng version.
If you have any problem, patches, suggestions, bug reports or are simply looking for help, please take advantage of the resources available on our web site (https://github.com/quadra-game/quadra)! Among others, we have a support request system, mailing lists, a bug tracking system and plenty of other goodies, check it out!
Good luck, and have fun!