Allegro pull requests

[ZoriaRPG]

Oh boy. GitHib , in the last few days, deprecated some older Firefox clients. Guess what no longer works? Branch selection.

Why the flidd would they disable that, for older browsers?

[DarkDragon]

Here's a crazy thought: upgrade your browser? Probably your computer is riddled via trojans if you haven't been keeping up with security updates...

Also, you don't need to do any branch selection on the GitHub site to download the code. Just git clone https://github.com/ArmageddonGames/allegro5.git and then on your computer (*not* your browser) switch to the 4.4-ZCfixes branch.

[Gleeok]

Could be. But if the keyboard thread doesn't run as often, that can also cause problems (slow response to keyboard input, missed keys, etc).

Oh no no no. I wasn't suggesting that as a fix (that would be stupid!), just contemplating why it works on old hardware and as the computers get newer the problems would get worse. ...yeah, I'm not so great with hardware. CPUs are just crazy complicated nowadays.



P.S. @ZoriaRPG : How's CMAKE working out for you so far?

[ZoriaRPG]

Oh no no no. I wasn't suggesting that as a fix (that would be stupid!), just contemplating why it works on old hardware and as the computers get newer the problems would get worse. ...yeah, I'm not so great with hardware. CPUs are just crazy complicated nowadays.



P.S. @ZoriaRPG : How's CMAKE working out for you so far?

Edit: I may have this sorted.

I managed to build 4.4.3, but it is spitting out loadpng.dll and jpgalleg.dll as separate files from alleg44.dll. I'm not sure how to fix that. Any clues would be helpful.

Are there linker options in MSVC to build this in a monolithic mode, or CMake flags to use? Egdar wasn't very optimistic, despite 4.4.2 building as a monolith before, and I believe 4.4.3 did, too.

The actual alleg44.dll is working, and seems somewhat faster ( 20 to 40% ) , but of course, PNG and JPEG loading are broken. I do not know how to force link these three.

Here's a crazy thought: upgrade your browser? Probably your computer is riddled via trojans if you haven't been keeping up with security updates...

Also, you don't need to do any branch selection on the GitHub site to download the code. Just git clone https://github.com/ArmageddonGames/allegro5.git and then on your computer (*not* your browser) switch to the 4.4-ZCfixes branch.

(1) Newer firefox builds run far slower, and less reliably. They are plain awful,a nd TBH, if I did not need some features that were not in 28.0, I would still be using that. I can count the number of websites that I visit on this machine on my fingers. The majority of the time, it is simple:

(2) On this system, those are AGN, Pure, DoctorWhoTV, Youtube, StackExchange, Pastebin, GutHub, SourceFoce, Twitch (streams only), and HitBox (broadcasting only); and now, allegro.cc. I rarely venture outside of this range, and I run NoAcript, with all scripts disabled by default. I only enable content that I can validate. I'm quite far from the typical Internet user. I also run ABP to prevent any unauthorised content that NS misses, and ABE to catch redirect exploits. These tools are vastly superior to anything that Firefox 4+ offers, and given that Firfox + tend to make this system unusably slow, there is no real reason to update, until some content that I need forces it

(3) I do not download binary files on this system, barring open source content that I can verify, or build; or libs from very trusted sources.

(4) In-browser security, is primarily in the form of exploit prevention. For the most part, the bloat added to newer browsers to make them prettier, or to tack on useless features, is pointless, and their exploits are generally avoided by careful control over the sites and the services that you use, and the content that you permit to run. As I permit nothing to run by default, it's unimportant.

(5) I use no 'social media' sites, I do not log into anything untrusted, and I generally keep my circle very small.
For other content, I VNC into a remote system, and use that.

I have most of the major cookie engines, data mining engines (such as Google's advert mining) and such set to loop back to 127.0.0.1; too.

When I must use a newer browser, I have a current install of Chrome, which runs terribly, uses 4x as much RAM, and has a terrible UI.

[DarkDragon]

So the issue is that Allegro is compiling loadpng as a dynamic rather than static library? You can try recompiling loadpng with SHARED off. If that doesn't work the easiest solution may be to change how *we* compile ZC so that we use loadpng (and possibly the other sound/graphics libraries) as dynamic libraries. But first see you can get Allegro to compile them as static libraries, because the fewer .dlls we have to ship with ZC, the better.

[Gleeok]

You may be able to open the generated msvc projects' properties and change them to "static library" instead of mussing with CMAKE I guess? Don't know if you'd then need to tell aleg44 to link library dependencies or not also.


I used to use Firefox 3.5 or something until a few years ago. I switched from that to Firefox 25.1 and immediately wanted to strangle the Mozilla team with razor wire. Build 45 is the last version I've used and you can imagine how I feel about that. Don't even get me started on google "technology" either...

Notice how youtube changed all their shit the last few weeks? Well yesterday youtube hung and crashed my graphics card. [True Story] Of course then windows couldn't figure out how to reload the offending ati lib and then Blue-Screened, so I had to restart. Makes me miss the good old days where youtube just randomly stops working until you Ctrl-F5 the page.... Oh no, wait. They still do that.

[ZoriaRPG]

You may be able to open the generated msvc projects' properties and change them to "static library" instead of mussing with CMAKE I guess? Don't know if you'd then need to tell aleg44 to link library dependencies or not also.


I used to use Firefox 3.5 or something until a few years ago. I switched from that to Firefox 25.1 and immediately wanted to strangle the Mozilla team with razor wire. Build 45 is the last version I've used and you can imagine how I feel about that. Don't even get me started on google "technology" either...

Notice how youtube changed all their shit the last few weeks? Well yesterday youtube hung and crashed my graphics card. [True Story] Of course then windows couldn't figure out how to reload the offending ati lib and then Blue-Screened, so I had to restart. Makes me miss the good old days where youtube just randomly stops working until you Ctrl-F5 the page.... Oh no, wait. They still do that.

I feel your pain. Now firefox is dropping extension support, entirely. All of the extensions and plug-ins that we use, will cease working with FF 53.

The Mozilla team simply does not care. I'm on the verge of exploring alternatives based on the older Mozilla code, or just compiling my own browsers.

I mucked about with the linker options, and I think that I have the libs linked. they seem to be working,

http://timelord.insomnia247.nl/zc/zc...Win_Beta_3.zip
New libs, only.

ugh. PNG and JPEG loading do work, but only on the second and later attempts. Something is not linked right, or the libs are not loading when the first instance of loading a file is called.

[Chris Miller]

@ZoriaRPG
Pale Moon is where it's at. There's also a 64-bit version. And none of the horseshit going on in the boardroom.

[DarkDragon]

I feel your pain. Now firefox is dropping extension support, entirely. All of the extensions and plug-ins that we use, will cease working with FF 53.

The Mozilla team simply does not care. I'm on the verge of exploring alternatives based on the older Mozilla code, or just compiling my own browsers.

I mucked about with the linker options, and I think that I have the libs linked. they seem to be working,

http://timelord.insomnia247.nl/zc/zc...Win_Beta_3.zip
New libs, only.

ugh. PNG and JPEG loading do work, but only on the second and later attempts. Something is not linked right, or the libs are not loading when the first instance of loading a file is called.

Why is there a jpgalleg.dll in the zip? As I already tried to explain, you need to build jpgalleg as a static library. Static and dynamic libraries both have the same file extension (.lib) but they are very different things.

The steps for doing this (works for me on MSVC 2015) are:

1. Run Allegro's CMake with SHARED set to true (checked).
2. Compile Allegro (only). This will generate alleg44.lib and alleg44.dll.
3. Run Allegro's CMake with SHARED set to false (unchecked).
4. Compile loadpng and jpgalleg (only). This will generate jpgalleg.lib and loadpng.lib (no .dlls).
5. Copy all .libs into libs/win32 in your ZC folder
6. Rename jpgalleg.lib to libjpgal.lib (or alternatively, change the name in CMakeLists.txt).
7. Build ZC
8. Copy alleg44.dll into whichever folder you are running the ZC .exes from.

Alternatively, you can skip steps 3-8 and instead build jpgalleg and loadpng from the standalone source, like we used to do (sources are in other/ldpng15.zip and other/jpgalleg-2.5.tar). These don't have Visual Studio projects so you'll have to configure and build them yourself (way easier than CMake, amirite?)

[ZoriaRPG]

Why is there a jpgalleg.dll in the zip? As I already tried to explain, you need to build jpgalleg as a static library. Static and dynamic libraries both have the same file extension (.lib) but they are very different things.

I forgot to delete them. The .lib files are there, too.

The steps for doing this (works for me on MSVC 2015) are:

1. Run Allegro's CMake with SHARED set to true (checked).
2. Compile Allegro (only). This will generate alleg44.lib and alleg44.dll.
3. Run Allegro's CMake with SHARED set to false (unchecked).
4. Compile loadpng and jpgalleg (only). This will generate jpgalleg.lib and loadpng.lib (no .dlls).
5. Copy all .libs into libs/win32 in your ZC folder
6. Rename jpgalleg.lib to libjpgal.lib (or alternatively, change the name in CMakeLists.txt).
7. Build ZC
8. Copy alleg44.dll into whichever folder you are running the ZC .exes from.

Alternatively, you can skip steps 3-8 and instead build jpgalleg and loadpng from the standalone source, like we used to do (sources are in other/ldpng15.zip and other/jpgalleg-2.5.tar). These don't have Visual Studio projects so you'll have to configure and build them yourself (way easier than CMake, amirite?)

I see the issue. Hmph. I should have thought about this a bit more, but, ah, the stresses of life.

I will give this a try. One thing to note, is that when I left ZC running for a few hours, it was stealing enter key presses from other programmes.. By that, I mean that until I exited ZC, my enter key did nothing elsewhere but I did not rebuild ZC in the process--my fault. I will check again after I rebuild it all.

Now I know what I'll be doing tomorrow.

P.S. Did you backport the fixes that you made (in response to Lut's post) from master to 2.50.x, so will I be doing that?