Hi all,
Bonifarz brought my attention to this thread. I'm a Debian developer and I also host the Einherjer Europe server for Red Eclipse.
I don't think the game is dying but here are some thoughts about how the Red Eclipse community could improve their "visibility" towards end users and how
Linux distributions work.
Two years ago I was the main driver to get Red Eclipse into Debian main. Before that it was part of Debian's contrib and even non-free distributions but I thought that wasn't right and the game deserved a place in Debian proper due to its use of completely free code and content which sets it apart from other fps games. Since then the popularity of the game steadily increased and even doubled in two years.
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=redeclipsePeople always worry about the hundreds of Linux distributions and how they should promote their games. Actually it's quite simple. Get your game into Debian and Fedora and you will reach 90% and more of all Linux users. Debian based distributions like Ubuntu just copy the latest packages from Debian unstable. Linux Mint in turn copies the packages from Ubuntu. You will almost never see a major divergence from Debian especially when we talk about games.
Debian:
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/redeclipsehttps://tracker.debian.org/pkg/redeclipse-dataFedora:
http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/redeclipse.git/The tricky part is keeping the game up-to-date in these distributions. As you can see the same guy packaged Red Eclipse for Debian and Fedora in the past but he has been busy for a while and so the distribution packages are lagging behind. I decided to help out for Debian and the package is now up-to-date again but since I maintain a few hundred packages a year though, I would prefer if someone else got involved in packaging Red Eclipse for Debian. It's not really hard but you have to spent a few hours when a new release comes out. Getting the package into Debian isn't that complicated anymore since it is team-maintained and you just need to ask for "sponsorship" on the team mailing list.
Another point is timing and release cycles. Although the game is up-to-date in Debian again now, the version in Ubuntu is still at 1.5.1. Ubuntu is in a so-called development freeze and at a certain point in time, automatic package migration from Debian is disabled and then they only cherry-pick new features and updates. If you want to get a certain release into Ubuntu, it should be released at least a month before they do their feature freeze. For instance a timeline for Ubuntu 16.10 can be found at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/YakketyYak/ReleaseSchedule. So that means no new version of Red Eclipse in Ubuntu proper until April 2017.
There are usually two easy ways to get around these release cycle limitations. Someone should get involved in providing backports and/or PPAs.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackportshttps://backports.debian.org/https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/PPACreating a PPA is really easy. Just grab the official sources from Debian unstable and upload a source-only version to your PPA. The auto-builders will take care of the rest.
In fact rebuilding a Debian package on another Debian based system is trivial.
1. Install all necessary build-tools with
apt-get install build-essential
2. Download the latest sources from Debian unstable
dget -x
http://http.debian.net/debian/pool/main ... .5.6-1.dscdget -x
http://http.debian.net/debian/pool/main ... .5.6-1.dsc3. Download the necessary build-dependencies
apt-get build-dep redeclipse
4. Build the package
cd redeclipse* && debuild -us -uc
That's it.
So in a nutshell.
1. Get involved in packaging the game for Debian and Fedora.
2. Provide latest releases via PPAs and/or backports.
3. Tell people how they can easily compile the game themselves
Of course you can still provide a standalone version of Red Eclipse with your own custom install mechanism etc. but it is usually far less time consuming to prepare Linux packages IMO.
Last but not least, please consider to extend the compatibility between different versions. In my opinion network compatibility should not break between minor releases as 1.5.5 -> 1.5.6 but only between major versions like 1.4 and 1.5. Players with an older client like 1.5.2 should be able to play on a server with version 1.5.6. This would definitely increase the available player pool. At the moment this isn't the case and I think this is one of the main reasons why only a few players are on the servers right now.
Cheers