[lugaru] Restarting the development of Lugaru (osslugaru repo)

[Rémi Verschelde]

Resending to the ML without tons of CC, as it got the previous attempt
greylisted.

Hi everyone,

## TL;DR

* We are restarting the development of the osslugaru repo over at
GitLab.com [1]: https://gitlab.com/osslugaru/lugaru
* The main motivation for this new effort is a positive feedback from
David Rosen about making all Lugaru HD assets CC-BY-SA 3.0, thus
making Lugaru fully libre.
* We want this new repo to be the official open source Lugaru code
base, and eventually maybe have David use it to deploy the commercial
game on Steam and the Humble Store. We're not there yet, some
cross-platform bug fixing and SDL2 port needs to be done.
* Please check this issue [2] and add your input there if you're
interested in partaking in this new effort and want to help shape it.

## TL;DR 2

We want *you* to get involved in the new development effort if you're
interested in hacking at Lugaru again. We're not far from having a
well maintained, stable version of this nice game, which could then be
enhanced much further than what the original version offers.

## Long version

I won't restate all of the TL;DR, but yes, Neal Gompa (Son_Goku), Côme
Chilliet-Bernigaud (MCMic) and I (Akien) have decided to resurrect the
osslugaru project which used to be hosted on Bitbucket [3].

### New repo

We chose to port it over from mercurial to git (better known nowadays,
so that's more potential contributors for the project) and to
GitLab.com (better than Bitbucket features-wise, and runs an open
source core (GitLab CE), so we can always migrate the repo to a self
or libre-hosted platform if we're not happy with the commercial one -
we also have a mirror on GitHub [4] for visibility's sake). We hope
that by increasing the visibility and lowering the entry barrier for
contributions we can build up a small community of devs around the
game (potentially including modders from the wolfire.com forums).

### Fully free assets

I had tried to contact David a couple years ago to discuss liberating
all Lugaru HD assets (currently the assets are a mix of CC-BY-SA 3.0
and Freeware/proprietary but redistributable for the sake of
convenience [5]), but without answer.

A couple weeks ago, I got a hold of him on Wolfire's discord channel
and could discuss this further. David agreed about relicensing the
assets so that we can give the open source project a new impulse (it's
more fun to work on a fully free game than one where you can't touch
and redistribute the required assets). Right now I'm waiting for him
to make a merge request on the new repo to make the relicensing
official.

David seemed also interested in the possibility to use the most
up-to-date open source code base for the commercial edition (which is
IINM based on a pre-open sourcing version + SDL2 port by Ryan [6]).
That's just an idea so far, it will depend on the interest of all
contributors and whether we can fix the current issues of the
osslugaru repo (not ported to SDL2 yet, Windows and OSX builds need
some love).

### Things to do

For those not familiar with it, the osslugaru repo was created as a
merge between various forks of the hg.icculus.org [7] repo, and has
therefore quite a few developments that were not in the original
version.

#### SDL2 port

Still, we had missed Ryan's email about his SDL2 port [6] as well as
Thomas Glamsch's two years later [8], so the osslugaru repo is not
ported to SDL2 yet [9]. I believe that adapting one of those two
patches to the current code base should not be too hard though, and
I'm willing to work on it. I would also appreciate some input or even
patches from Ryan or Thomas if they're interested.

#### Fixing Windows (and maybe OSX?) builds

Another important task will be to ensure that the code builds and runs
with no regressions (compared to the commercial build) on all
supported platforms (Linux, OSX and Windows). Neal has setup CI
already for Linux/clang, Linux/gcc, and Windows/mingw
(cross-compiled), and right now the latter seems not to build. We'll
be working on this in the coming days, and help is always welcome.

OSX builds likely weren't tried in a long time, so I'd be surprised if
the old Xcode templates still built out of the box with Xcode 7 or
Xcode 8. Some help would also be very appreciated here.

That's it for this already way-too-long email. If possible, please try
to reply to the icculus mailing list so that we can keep all
subscribers in the loop and have the discussion archived.

Cheers,
Rémi / Akien

[0] http://icculus.org/mailman/listinfo/lugaru
[1] https://gitlab.com/osslugaru/lugaru
[2] https://gitlab.com/osslugaru/lugaru/issues/1
[3] https://bitbucket.org/osslugaru/lugaru/
[4] https://github.com/osslugaru/lugaru/
[5] https://gitlab.com/osslugaru/lugaru/blob/master/CONTENT-LICENSE.txt
[6] https://icculus.org/pipermail/lugaru/2013-June/000051.html
[7] http://hg.icculus.org/icculus/lugaru/
[8] https://icculus.org/pipermail/lugaru/2015-February/000052.html
[9] https://gitlab.com/osslugaru/lugaru/issues/2