Month: October 2011

The residualvm-tools repository was born on April, 7th this year. From the very first moment I felt its build system was broken, mainly for these three reasons:

1. to build a specific tool you must run “make tools/foo”. The repo is called residualvm-tools, there should be no need to specify “tools” in the make call too;
2. there isn’t a single line of Makefile code shared between the different tool targets;
3. each submodule of tools/, like tools/lua/module.mk, needs to be added in Makefile.common. I’d like a way to set it up into tools/module.mk, with a parent-child relationship.

So some days ago I decided to try to improve it a bit, even though I never wrote a single line of a Makefile.

My first try was to work on rules.mk: I modified a bit the code that created a target from the value of TOOL_EXECUTABLE and of some other variables. After some trial and error I came up with a piece of code that allowed me to put in tools/module.mk, for each tool, something like this:

TOOL_EXECUTABLE := unlab
MODULE_OBJS := unlab.o
include $(srcdir)/rules.mk

TOOL_EXECUTABLE := vima
MODULE_OBJS := vima.o
include $(srcdir)/rules.mk

....

Quite ugly, but still better than before.

Then I started working on 3. Long story short, I couldn’t come up with an acceptable solution.

Then an heretic thought passed through my mind: CMake!
I really like the add_executable and add_subdirectory functions of CMake, but I know that porting to CMake would require a big effort, since it doesn’t work out of the box on all the platforms configure currently supports.
So I started thinking: configure works perfectly, I just need a way to confortably generate a bit of Makefile code. configure is an sh script, why not just use sh?

So I wrote a script, makegen, with the functions add_executable and add_subdirectory.

add_subdirectory() {
    MODULE="$MODULE/$1"
    . $srcdir/$MODULE/module.mg
    MODULE="${MODULE%/$1}"
}

add_executable() {
    echo -n "$1_SOURCES := " >> $builddir/Makefile.modules
    for f in $2; do
        echo -n "$MODULE/$f " >> $builddir/Makefile.modules
    done
    echo >> $builddir/Makefile.modules

    echo -e \
"build: $1
$1_DIRS := \$(sort \$(dir \$($1_SOURCES)))
$1_dirs:
    \$(QUIET)\$(MKDIR) \$($1_DIRS)
$1: $1_dirs \$($1_SOURCES)
    \$(QUIET)\$(MKDIR) \$(DEPDIR)
    \$(QUIET_CXX)\$(CXX) \$(LDFLAGS) $3 \$(DEFINES) -I. -I\$(srcdir) \
    \$(filter %.cpp %.o, $+) -o \$@\$(EXEEXT)
EXECUTABLES += $1\$(EXEEXT)
clean: clean/$1
clean/$1:
    \$(QUIET)\$(RM) \$($1_SOURCES) $1
    \$(RMDIR) \$($1_DIRS) \n" >> $builddir/Makefile.modules
}

This script is called from configure and it simply generates a file Makefile.modules with the targets for the tools.

Now, adding a new tool is simply a matter of adding in tools/module.mg

add_executable toolname "toolname.o foo.o bar.o"

You’ll then be able to call make toolname.

This is not finished and still experimental, and I can’t know if it will ever be actually used, but I would like to hear some thoughts.

This is the first installment of a periodic (I don’t know the frequency yet, could be weekly or monthly, or a mixture) series on what happens around Residual ResidualVM.

First of all, if you don’t know it already, there has been some ferment recently around a project born on the forums aimed at improving the graphics quality of Grim Fandango, both improving texture quality, models and even making Grim widescreen!
You can read more about this on Johnny’s blog.

As regards the code, Einar (aka somaen) refactored the Smush code, making it more clean and maintainable. I finally implemented collision handling between actors when walking to a point. No more Manny walking through the signpost or Velasco or Glottis! Another worthy point, the savegame format changed, so if you had some saves made before the 3rd, say bye bye to them.
(Or don’t update Residual ResidualVM.)

That’s it for now, stay tuned for the next updates!