Sunday, August 28, 2005

QuArK, MoinMoin, and Quake II build tools

A bit of a saga to relate.

Since I'm going to be leaving my job, I decided to get back involved with QuArK development. I thought that, since this was a long weekend, I'd be able to get some stuff done.

The first order of business was to get shell access to the QuArK SourceForge project again, because cdunde had removed them while I was inactive (I'm now an admin again -- yay). The reason this was urgent was that SourceForge.net changed the way that project web servers worked, and this had terminally broken the QuArK wiki.

Well, thanks to a very helpful page on the MoinMoin wiki, I manage to get the thing working again, and it's actually working better now than it was before. There are two big problems though: firstly, I couldn't get access to the old database to copy it across, so I had to reset the wiki, which sucks; secondly, the data directory is now world-writeable, which means that anyone can just rm -rf the whol wiki if they want to. So I suppose I'll just have to get round to actually making backups...

Having done that, I moved on to doing some housekeeping tasks: restoring the LatestVersion page (and all of the older version pages), creating page templates, etc, etc. I also wrote an article on HowToInstallQuark.

This morning, I came to start writing some more howtos, and decided to start with an explanation of how to set up QuArK for Quake II editing. While doing so, I realized something suprising, and slightly worrying: the tools recommended for use with QuArK haven't been updated in years, and there are tools with enhanced features that don't work properly with QuArK. So I decided to do something about it.

I got the source code to Geoffrey DeWan's tools, which are currently accepted as the best available, and decided to add the QuArK support functions to them. The only problem was, no Microsoft Visual C compiler. So I duly got out my automake and autoconf manuals, and got busy writing the necessary scripts.

The end result? I've got my own distribution of the Quake II map compilers, available from my website. Madness.

Now to try and add Armin's enhancements for QuArK into the mix. Should be lots of fun!

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