Following on from David’s work to port the shaders to GLSL, I’ve been working over the last week or so to get the code compiling for the Linux port. Fortunately Voxeliens is built on top of a number of fantastic open-source projects such as OGRE and Qt which work perfectly on Linux already. As far as our own code, Voxeliens make extensive use of our PolyVox library which I have all along been building and testing on Linux.
Since all our dependencies were working fine, it simply became a case of getting the Voxeliens code itself compiling. This was largely a trivial job, with the bulk of the work involving fixing incorrect case in C++ includes and media files. The largest single change that had to be made was to the keyboard handling. Qt doesn’t provide access to the low level keyboard APIs on Windows or Linux so I had to write some native X11 code to complement the windows.h code we already had.
We still have some work to do on the GLSL shaders to get shadows working and to ensure compatibility with OpenGL 2.1 (since that seems the best target for Linux) and then it’s mostly the work to get it packaged up for distribution across all the different flavours and versions of Linux. Sorting out shared libraries and dependencies is going to be the most amount of work. We’ll be putting out a call for testers once it’s nearer to release to hammer out any problems in this area.
I’ll write up a more technical, in-depth post after the release about the porting process for those who are interested.
