One question that keeps popping up: "when do we release 2.0?".
NewGRF will force that at least 1.16 will be 2.0, but to not wait
for this, let's drop the "1." and be for ever done with that
conversation.
We are following in the footstep of giants here.
With std::variant all memory can be figured out at compile time, so the compiler needs to keep track of fewer elements. It also saves out a unique_ptr and its memory management, over a slight impact for resolving a setting.
Although for developers this doesn't change anything, for our
linux-generic binary it changes everything. Without this, the
OpenGL dynamic library is dragged in as dependency, and as it
depends on X11, that will be dragged in too. This is not
something we prefer to have, as that won't run on as many
machines as it could.
SDL2 doesn't depend on OpenGL directly, as it tries to load it
in on runtime. If found, it would work in exactly the same way
as if we would link to OpenGL ourselves. As such, this is
the best of both worlds: our linux-generics have less linked
dependencies, and developers won't notice any difference.
As a side-effect, if someone uses linux-generic on a machine
that does not have any OpenGL package installed, it will
gracefully fall back to the default backend of SDL instead.
These bundles can be opened on any "modern" Linux machine with
a driver that SDL2 supports.
Machines needs at least glibc 2.15, which was released 10 years ago.
It is build with CentOS 7 as base, and only assumes the following
libraries are available on the system:
- libc
- libdl
- libgcc_s
- libpthread
- librt
- libstdc++
All other libraries the game depends on are bundled together with
the game, so users don't need any library installed to use this
bundle. The downside of course is that this increases the binary
size a bit: 30 MiB of libraries are in this bundle.
RPATH is used to make ld-linux find the folder libraries are
stored in; however, system libraries are always used before these,
in the assumption libraries on the user system are more up-to-date.
Using -DOPTION_PACKAGE_DEPENDENCIES=ON switches on packaging
of libraries in the "lib" folder. This requires CMake 3.16 to
be installed; otherwise it will fail.
Sergii Pylypenko