Compiling Tux Rider

Question

Tux Rider is an iPhone port of the famous Tux Racer game. As it's GPL software, the source is available on the author's website. I downloaded the source, but can't get it to compile as it's missing resources. Specifically, I get the following compile errors:

Rider: No such file or directory
World:  No such file or directory
Challenge:  No such file or directory
v1.1:  No such file or directory

I can't find any contact information for the author, and I'd like to be able to build my own version of the app. I have a iPhone SDK and it seems like modifying a working game would be a good intro into learning OpenGL. Has anyone had any success in getting this game to compile?

Answer 1

I suspect that there is more than 1 source file you need to obtain however, bear in mind that even if you can get this to compile you won't be able to load it onto your iPhone without being a paid-up iPhone developer. If you just want to play this game on your iPhone then I suggest you buy it through the App Store, it'll be a lot cheaper than the $99 to join the iPhone developer programme.

Answer 2

If you're goal is simply to learn OpenGL, I would strongly recommend not trying this right now. Why?

• You're going to be spending your time chasing down all of the things that won't compile correctly for the iPhone SDK, and my gut feeling that in a game the size of Tux Racer, there are going to be a lot of them. If you don't know OpenGL to begin with, it's going to make your job 100x harder.

• OpenGL on the iPhone (OpenGL ES) is a subset of standard OpenGL. I'd imagine that unless Tux Racer was written strictly against OpenGL ES, which I very much doubt, you're going to have to spend a lot of time coming up with OpenGL ES equivalent ways of doing things, and if you don't know OpenGL you will again be making your job 100x harder.

If you want to learn OpenGL on the iPhone, I highly recommend this blog series: iPhone OpenGL ES Tutorial Series. It's very informative, very well written, and is focused on writing OpenGL code for the iPhone itself. Good luck!

Answer 3

It sounds like this port breaks the GPLv2 terms and conditions, but I'm not a lawyer.

Read the license carefully and report it to http://gpl-violations.org and let them have a look at it too. The identity of the port author can't stay hidden (as Apple must have it) in case that the Free Software Foundation decides to take legal action.

Making money on compiled and packaged GPL products is nothing new. But it must be done while not violating the license, otherwise it's just greed.

Answer 4

Judging from the error, I'm going to guess that you untarred into a directory named "Tux Rider World Challenge v1.1", and something in the build scripts or the Makefile is not quoting path arguments correctly. Try moving the source into a directory that has no spaces anywhere in its full path name, then repeating the build process.