DevilutionX package in the Debian (+ Ubuntu, etc.) official repositories

[vv221]

I plan to start working soon on integrating DevilutionX into the official Debian repositories, so all Debian users could install it by running apt install devilutionx without having to go through GitHub. This would in turn make it available for Debian derivatives like Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

If you wish to follow all activity on this front, I will keep the following Debian bug report updated: https://bugs.debian.org/1088174

If some maintainers of DevilutionX would like to be kept in the loop for anything DevilutionX-related on the Debian side, please share an e-mail with me and I’ll make sure to include you in all further discussion.

Obviously, feel free to ask for any kind of detail, and I’ll answer to the best of my abilities.

[AJenbo]

Thanks, I tried having things like game-data-packager in mind when modeling something. It should be possible to fetch the shareware and extract spawn.mpq from it using smpq so that might be a useful option similar to how you can install the shareware data from doom and quake.

wget http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/demos/diablosw.exe
smpq -x diablosw.exe spawn.mpq

If both spawn.mpq and diabdat.mpq are available the engine will prefer the full game.

[vv221]

To be fair this initial packaging is only going to include the engine, so Debian users are still going to be directed towards tools like game-data-packager or ./play.it to fetch and provide the game data. But now they will at least be able to fetch the engine directly from their distribution repositories, with the added benefit that these tools will no longer have to be updated to handle each new DevilutionX release, as they can expect the distribution to provide it already.

Please don’t bother too much about game-data-packager or ./play.it when designing DevilutionX, it’s our job on Debian side to ensure all things work well together. If really some future quirk makes it harder to work with DevilutionX, we’ll get in touch and see how to resolve that. But until then you can assume that all is in a good state.

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Your suggestion about the shareware data is interesting, I wonder if we could provide that directly from the non-free section of the Debian repositories (legal questions might get in the way, so no promises on this one). So users would be one apt install (…) away to be able to play the shareware build of Diablo through DevilutionX, and would need to rely on extra operations only if they want to play the full game.

[AJenbo]

Please don’t bother too much about game-data-packager or ./play.it when designing DevilutionX

Too late by a few years: #387 (comment)

[AJenbo]

I wonder if we could provide that directly from the non-free section of the Debian repositories

On the retail CD you get this pop up when selecting to install the shareware:

You can install a spawned version of Diablo on your friends' systems so that they can play Diablo without having the Diablo CD-ROM in their computer.

The original download page for the shareware: https://web.archive.org/web/19980128201335/http://www.blizzard.com/library/diablosw.htm

This demo is intended for private use only, and is not to be commercially distributed.

[AJenbo]

While only the GOG installer is supported for now, adding support for the CD-ROM versions of the game
could be done too.

The CD is very simple, the diabdat.mpq is in the root, just copy it or point the game to it.

p.s. you mentioned not being in email contact with us, I have also fixed that.

[vv221]

I think I still have an original copy of the CD-ROM around (Diablo was actually one of my very first video games, a couple years after its release), I’m going to run some tests with that and see what I can get out of it.

[AJenbo]

Here is me running it directly from the original CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk9GwVIhOGc

The 4 Hellfire MPQ files are also present directly on the Helfire CD

[AJenbo]

We have a guide for how to extract both the Diablo and Hellfire MPQ files from the GOG installer here in case that's helpful: https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/wiki/Extracting-MPQs-from-the-GoG-installer