Sear nightly builds and testing

2005/06/03 Sear nightly builds and testing by: simon

With LinuxTag looming, it would be great to show off all our bug free code. Before we can do that, we need to get rid of the bugs, so I would like as many people as possible to test Sear.

I have setup a nightly build of sear for both Linux and Win32 and its available via WFUT (http://worldforge.org/dev/eng/tools/wfut). Download either the sear-devel-linux or the sear-devel-win32 channels. Media is downloaded separately by executing Sear. The nightly build uses the lastest CVS versions of mercator, eris, wfmath varconf and sear at the time of build. Should the build fail, then the channel will not be updated, however this is not to say the binary will work correctly.

Pleases report any bugs to client@worldforge.org and hopefully the fixes should show up in a future nightly build within a few days. See below for current issues.

General Notes: Java needs to be installed and on the PATH. This is for WFUT to run and be able to download the required media for sear to run. WFUT is compiled using Sun's JDK 1.4.2. It may run under newer versions of the GNU java implementation. Linux Notes:

To start Sear run sear-devel-linux/bin/sear. This will start WFUT to download the sear-media-new channel, then execute the real sear binary.
The Linux build of sear will only work on more recent linux systems with glibc version 2.3.

Win32 Notes:

To start Sear, run sear.bat. This will first use WFUT to update the sear-devel-win32 files, then use WFUT to download the sear-media-new files.

Guides: Please see the following URL's for guides to using Sear. These need updating to the latest features, but are still relevant.

In addition to the documented commands, there are also /wield and /use commands. /wield <name> equips your character with an item in your inventory. e.g. /wield axe will equip an axe. The /use command will change your cursor and will *use* the equiped item on the next entity you click on, e.g. an oak tree. Please let me know if there is something wrong. Current Issues:

No GUI -- This is being worked on. Hopefully there will be something in time for LT, but no promises yet!
Sear often crashes on ATI cards. Any information relating to this issue will be helpful.

What to test/report:

Documented features (see above url's)
Look for missing / incorrect / broken media.
Small feature requests (larger request will have to wait till after LT)
Crashes! Please attach all output (stdout.txt/stderr.txt for win32 users), hardware (especially gfx card), OS + version, a backtrace if possible and what your were doing at the time.

Happy WorldForging! Simon