Updated Build for Ubuntu & Further Development

[leezer3]

Hi,
I'm not sure my mails are getting through to you, so I'm going to try this :)

The current build of OpenBVE in the Ubuntu repositories has two fundamental problems, plus some smaller ones.

Large Issues:

1. Crashes libgdiplus due to malformed main menu .PNG files. ==> Solution- Re-compress the PNGs in the data folder.
2. Crashes when selecting a route. This is caused by an Application.DoEvents() call in the ShowRoute function.

Small issues:
3. Main menu tabs grey. ==> Solution- Manually call the select tab function on load when running under Mono.

I've got a much updated build of OpenBVE, which has been ported to OpenTK here:
https://github.com/leezer3/OpenBVE

There's one issue remaining (Joysticks don't move in the configuration menu when SDL2 is installed) before I'd consider this relatively ready for looking towards a Ubuntu patch.

I'd like to try and at the least get a patch included in Ubuntu for the two major issues outlined above.
I can fork this repo and fix them easily enough, but I've fixed considerably more smaller stuff in my repo.

[leezer3]

*** Note: *** I think I can setup an upstream pull request for my whole source lump by forking and cloning.
Haven't really done much commiting to other people's repositories though....

[JakubVanek]

With some help I can set up a nightly and beta PPA (and maybe some read only CI) using my nonstop running Raspberry Pi.

[JonnyTech]

Crashes libgdiplus due to malformed main menu

This is fixed by installing libgdipls from https://github.com/mono/libgdiplus/archive/master.zip
No need to recompress any PNG's and works with all combinations and OpenBVE I have tried.

[dcorking]

@JakubVanek will your build be ARM only, or will it be entirely cross-platform CIL bytecode?

[JakubVanek]

I thought about using xbuild in a shell script, so yeah, if I launch it, it will build standard MSIL binaries.

[leezer3]

Since I seem to be the current maintainer (No idea how!), some observations on ARM/ Pi builds:

A build for the ARM achitecture in and of itself is no trouble. C# inherantly runs on any system that the interpreter does (Mono).

The program has the following dependancies:
OpenTK (Handles OpenGL/ OpenAL)
SharpCompress (Handles archives)
CS-Script (Can be used in animations)

These should work natively under ARM, however we have one problem:
ARM systems generally only have hardware support for OpenGL-ES.
OpenBVE is built using OpenGL 1.0 intermediate mode.

Using Mesa (Software OpenGL emulation), things may well run, but whether that's at a reasonable speed is another thing entirely.

[dcorking]

Last time I tried to build openbve for Fedora under Mono (many months ago) I spent several unfruitful hours. So 👍 to this proposal to start nightly builds: it will highlight buildable and unbuildable commits, as well as maintaining a reference build script that Linux/BSD packagers can base their work on. (If the Pi builds against Mesa, but users actually run the app on more performant PCs, this may work.)

[leezer3]

To the best of my knowledge, my repo should build under Linux just fine with no changes required.
JakubVanek and mgavioli are both building successfully under Ubuntu, but I'll admit that no-one has tried Fedora.
If you can't get it to build by default, please open an issue and we can do some digging.
https://github.com/leezer3/OpenBVE

Assuming the build has the AnyCPU flag set, code compiled under either Linux or Windows ought to run on the Pi with Mesa installed.
The first time OpenGL functions are called is when things may throw a wobbly, which would be immediately after the 'Start' button is clicked.
I've got a couple of Pi v1 machines here, so will try and see what happens at some stage this week,

[JonnyTech]

@leezer3:
Can you provide build instructions for Ubuntu please.
I assume that I need to install mono-complete.
Are there any other dependencies (apart from OpenTK)?
Is the build command a simple terminal one-liner?

[JakubVanek]

LC_ALL=C xbuild /t:Build /p:Configuration=Release cloned-repo/openBVE/OpenBve.sln

I've googled that LC_ALL=C is required on Raspbian for some locales because otherwise you get strange errors like "Internal compiler error: input string is not in correct format". cs_CZ.UTF-8 is a good example.

[JakubVanek]

I can confirm that Mono 3.2.8 on Raspbian builds openBVE binaries successfully.

What I don't know how to do:

• how to package binaries so I can somehow put it on Launchpad - I could customize old debian files by trial-and-error method,
• whether I should use Jenkins or some combination of shell scripts + cron instead,
• whether cron polling is better than webhook tunnel (ngrok, for example). Here I assume that the answer is no.
• how to signal if build succeeded of failed from a shell script.

[leezer3]

Playing with Travis-CI at the minute.
If I can get this to work, it'll create the builds for us, and I should just need to get it to upload somewhere (Famous last words....)

[leezer3]

OK, so we have it building and uploading!

Trying to get Nginx to do a directory listing now.....
The first auto-generated build is here:
http://vps.bvecornwall.co.uk/OpenBVE/Builds/OpenBVE-2016-03-07.tar.gz

The system will store one build a day (If a newer commit is pushed to the branch master then the daily build will update)

Edit:
Daily auto-generated builds available from here as of now-
http://vps.bvecornwall.co.uk/OpenBVE/Builds/

[leezer3]

Further note:
I will need to do something about keeping a limited number of nightlies (Server space isn't free!)
Will look at this in due course-
Anyone have any preference as to how many builds I keep? I'm thinking up-to 100, which would be 500mb worth of builds.