OpenTyrian: Works just fine on FreeBSD UNIX

[thrawn]

Hello,

I just checked the [download page] of OpenTyrian once again, first time since a few years. I noticed it supports Linux with what seems to be a GNU Makefile, so I crossed my fingers and attempted to compile the source code on FreeBSD 10.1 UNIX, which I am using on my Laptop.

You can't use BSD make, cause it's expecting a different Makefile syntax, but when one installs GNU make (gmake), you can just do:

$ gmake release

...and it compiles just fine even though FreeBSD 10.x now uses the Clang/LLVM compiler instead of GCC. Clang/LLVM is a bit more strict on what it reports as errors, but there was only a single warning during compilation and that's it...

$ file opentyrian
opentyrian: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (FreeBSD), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for FreeBSD 10.1, stripped



Beautiful!

I'm surprised OpenTyrian isn't in FreeBSDs ports collection already.

I thought maybe the developers could claim official support for OpenTyrian on FreeBSD on the download page instead of only mentioning Linux and Windows for compiling the source. Makes it look good I believe, and it works so easily, I was pleasantly surprised by that! Also, everything including sound just seems to work. Now I can play OpenTyrian on the train on my FreeBSD book when I'm bored.

I'm not sure whether FreeBSD includes all dependencies by default, only thing that comes to my mind would be SDL and gmake? Easy enough for sure. 

[yuriks]

We don't advertise FreeBSD support because none of the maintainers uses and can test regularly on it, that said we avoid OS-specific things as much as possible, so I'm not surprise it works fine. Good to hear.

I actually did a pass with clang a while ago to weed out warnings and see if its static analysis would find any new bugs.

[thrawn]

Ah, I see. I thought about becoming a FreeBSD port maintainer for it for a moment, but I believe I do not yet know enough about the FreeBSD ports system (only as a user and patch contributor, not as an actual maintainer). I'm curious though, so maybe I'll look at it.

Also: How is the Tyrian 2.1 data supposed to be handled? I can't find any license, only the information that it was released as "freeware" without any license attached. How would one handle something like this?! Is this GPLv2 compatible? Or GPLv3? Or BSD 3-clause? Couldn't really find any information on the OpenTyrian page on this topic either.

Well, I guess for now I'm just going to enjoy playing the game.