README for Geekosphere, version 0.6

Written December 1999 by Ben Gertzfield <che@debian.org>
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Presented for your approval: one simple, gentle-looking 3-D sphere.
But this is no ordinary sphere; for it comes from:

THE GEEKOSPHERE ZONE. (cue cheesy music!)

Geekosphere is an OpenGL plugin for the XMMS audio player for Unix and
Unix-like systems. It uses NURBS surfaces to define a sphere that
twists and distorts in time with the music, with lighting effects and
all. 

You can run in wireframe, texture-mapped, or smooth-shaded mode.
Other configuration options are available from the configuration
dialog (Control-V from the main xmms window). If you notice
Geekosphere is running too slowly or too quickly, just resize the
window or push the level of detail up or down in the configuration
dialog.

To compile, simply run:

% make
(su to root)
# make install

The makefile uses the xmms-config program, installed with xmms (or 
with its development files, if you installed with a package manager)
to automatically detect the correct paths and flags.

This version of the Geekosphere plugin does not require the main XMMS
source tree to build, but you must have an "xmms-devel" or equivalent
Debian or RPM package installed if you have not installed the main
xmms tree from source by hand, as the header files in
/usr/include/xmms/ are needed to compile any plugin.

You also need:

 * OpenGL (available free from http://www.mesa3d.org/ -- but watch out,
           Mesa 3.1 is very unstable with this plugin!)
 * POSIX threads (available in the 'pthread' library, part of the GNU C
                  Library)
 * GTK+ 1.2 and GLib 1.2 (http://www.gtk.org/)

and, of course, XMMS 0.9.5.1 or greater.

Ignore the warnings from the configure script about not being able to
find "xmms-config"; I wrote a lot of autoconf macros in preparation
for the next version of XMMS, which will have an "xmms-config" script
I've written in it, similar to GTK+ and GLib's "gtk-config" and
"glib-config" scripts.

Geekosphere has been tested on Solaris (with Creator3D acceleration)
and Linux (with no acceleration, as it seems to crash the GLX Nvidia
Riva TNT acceleration module, bringing down XFree86 hard! Ouch.).

It may work on other systems; please let me know if you have problems.
In particular, Mesa 3.1 is either very buggy or I'm doing some NURBS
things it really doesn't like, as it crashes quite a lot with this
plugin.

If you want your own texture-map instead of the one provided, simply
create a SGI RGB-format file (GIMP can write these) and make sure the
dimensions are a power of two on each axis (256x256, 512x512, etc.)

Then, in the configure dialog, bring up the file selector and choose
your own texture map. Voila!

-- Ben Gertzfield <che@debian.org> 16 December 1999
-- Allon L 13 November 2025