I'm feeling annoyed. I'm not actually mad at anyone in particular, and I don't want to anyone to feel bad, but being pressured to exert effort to help people with cross-platform stuff, when I don't actually have the knowledge or inclination to do that, is a bit frustrating for me. It makes me feel like I'm lazy or unhelpful or falling short of expectations when I say no. I'm glad the game has cross-platform compatibility, but honestly, that's
despite my involvement, not because of it. I just work on the game itself; I did not port the game, and I've unknowingly broken the Linux version multiple times. It took hours of working with someone over IM to fix the old flag burning on Linux crash bug.
Even now, I don't really grok the install process for Linux. I don't know what packages you need. I don't know what might change between distributions. I can't even test a source code package to make sure everything you need is included. I have managed to install the game on a Mac once or twice, but that was years ago, and I did that by following instructions, not by actually knowing what I was doing. I am really the wrong person to ask for help with this stuff. It's like asking a non-programmer to give someone instructions on programming: I don't know anything about the subject, and I am not qualified to help anyone to do it.
I'm happy to have a better install process for Linux, but someone else needs to make it happen. If you want to provide an instruction set and download, and I can see that this works for other people, I'm happy to link those things in the first post. That's what I did with the SVN download instructions provided by Carlos Gustavos. But no matter how much you lecture me about how
I ought to provide this help myself, you're still asking the wrong person. I can't test the downloads. I can't make sure the instructions work. I have no knowledge of what packages are needed. I don't know the differences between Linux distributions. I don't even know what parts of the instructions
might change between distributions, let alone what changes would be needed. Even if I took instructions that work for one person, they might not work for the next, and I'd be totally unable to say why.
If you're looking for the source code of 4.06.3 and no other changes past that, it's still possible to get it by checking out version 598 from the SVN repository. However, the latest SVN trunk should never be broken; we're pretty good about that. I once booted someone from the project for unintentionally but repeatedly breaking the SVN build. LCS also doesn't typically go through a "stable/unstable" build cycle... someone might add a feature that's ill-advised, but that's pretty uncommon. Usually anything someone commits is kept for the next major release. When it comes to grabbing code off of SVN, the latest is usually the greatest.
Guys, do you know how exactly do I play LCS in dos? I know about the HX dos extender, but I had problems installing it. How do I install it? (On a mac, at least?) And Fox, please compile me LCS if you can
I suspect it's not possible to play in true DOS; the game only supports Windows, Linux, and (incidentally from supporting Linux) OSX. It looks like a DOS game, but the Windows version still relies on Windows, under the hood.
As far as a pre-compiled OSX release, while I have been able to compile LCS for OSX in the past, I wouldn't feel comfortable building and providing a download for Mac. The Linux/Mac install process places files in multiple directories, not just one place. I would have to do some research to figure out where those are. I would also want to look into how to do it right: I'd make an installer script that re-installs the files in the correct places, and probably a second script that you could put in your applications directory as a proxy for the game's executable; it would launch the terminal, set it up with the right dimensions and text brightness settings, and run the game. Or, it might be straightforward to make a proper app in the applications directory, which contains the script. I don't know, since I've never done Mac development.
The reason it would be important to me to have scripts to do these things automatically for a Mac install is that the user base for Macs is very casual when it comes to getting under the hood. Mac applications install by dragging and dropping a single file into the applications directory. It's super user friendly. Having a really messy, complicated install process for Mac, that involves manually digging into uncommonly used folders and dropping files in places that don't exist yet... I think for most Mac players, that's way too high of a barrier to entry. Macs are all about stuff just working with needing to fiddle or be an expert.