Creatures Internet Edition Linux - Mageia 8 howto

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Creatures Internet Edition Linux - Mageia 8 howto

Postby marast78 » Nov 19th, '21, 18:18

Since it's quite an old game, it has some problems on today's systems, but it can work nicely in the end. I tested the game on 64bit Mageia 8 (using DVD install with Gnome 3 as the DE).

First, download the updated game installer (creatures_new_installer.run) from here: https://ia902902.us.archive.org/19/item ... creatures/
and make it executable.

Code: Select all
$ chmod +x ./creatures_new_installer.run

Then mount the Creatures Internet Edition iso image. Either with cdemu or just with standard mount (you need to be root for this). To mount it to /mnt/cdrom e.g.:
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# mount -o loop linuxcie.iso /mnt/cdrom

The game requires some 32it libs that are not present on default 64bit Mageia8 installation. All installer's missing dependencies can be satisfied with 32bit packages from Mageia repos. So enable the mageia.i586 repo and its updates and install these 3 packages:

libsm6, libxi6 and libzlib1.

If you don't install them, the installer will still run, but in text mode where it will be necessary to manually change all the presented paths, as they will default to /usr/local. And since the game itself will require all of those libs anyway, it's better to install them before the installer is being run.
Game's other needed libs are not in Mageia repos. I tested the Fedora 33 ones, you can get them here e.g.:

https://download-ib01.fedoraproject.org ... 3.i686.rpm
and
https://download-ib01.fedoraproject.org ... 3.i686.rpm

Now, there are two ways of dealing with those. I refrain from installing other distros packages, but for testing purposes I installed those two in the VM. They work fine. There is an advantage to this approach regarding the game itself. If installed by the package manager, the game should just run after the installation without having to do anything else. Otoh, the obvious disadvantage is that these are out-of-repo, other distro packages and so they can cause problems later as far as dependencies go.

So, now we have everything needed, so go to terminal and run the creatures_new_installer.run file you downloaded before (as a standard user, not root).
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$ ./creatures_new_installer.run

Installer will first try to install LGP update. It's probably rather useless today, so you can just click 'cancel'. This will automatically prepare installation of the Uninstaller. You can cancel that one as well, but the facility to uninstall the game will not be available. No big deal, you can always simply delete the relevant files manually.
Note: the Uninstaller will not work anyway, unless you installed the two downloaded rpms with package manager.

After those two LGP parts installed (or not, per your choice), installation of the game follows. It will by default set both, game directory and symlink to the game's launch script to the same path and that will not work, as they have the same name by default. So either change the name of the game directory to install to, or change the symlink path instead. It's important, as the symlink to the game's launch script is the only way to properly run the game. You can of course create it yourself later if you wish. To be precise, you can run the creatures3 script from anywhere, just not directly from within the same directory level.

So, after the installation is done and you try to run the game with the symlink installer created, there will be two possible outcomes.
It will either just run or complain about not finding libgtk-1.2.so.0. The former outcome (it runs) is because the 2 rpms were installed by package manager. The latter outcome is because they were not.
So if you didn't install the 2 rpms, you need to extract the needed files and put them in the game's installation directory:

from gtk+ rpm:
@libgdk-1.2.so.0 libgdk-1.2.so.0.9.1 @libgtk-1.2.so.0 libgtk-1.2.so.0.9.1

from glib rpm:
@libglib-1.2.so.0 libglib-1.2.so.0.0.10 @libgmodule-1.2.so.0 libgmodule-1.2.so.0.0.10

(I listed also the symlinks, as these are the actual filenames the game looks for and so they are needed.)

Now if you try to run the game again, it will complain still. I didn't thoroughly investigate the creatures3 script, but this is what will help.
Open creatures3 script with whatever text editor you use and input this line just before the 'set -e' statement:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:.
This will keep the current lib path you have set and will also add another path in terms of the current directory, the one where the other needed libs are.

The game should now run. So choose your language to continue.
But it will likely complain about sound after that ;) It will work without it, but it surely is better with it. It should be only OSS emulation related modules that are not loaded and so loading them should be enough. For a quick test open terminal, become root and load the required modules:

Code: Select all
# modprobe snd-pcm-oss snd-seq-oss snd-mixer-oss

Now try to run the game again. If the sound works, you can make the modules load every time by putting their lines in the /etc/modules file. Well, with systemd, it should go into /etc/modules-load.d/*.conf, but since Mageia has a symlink there to /etc/modules, it's perfectly fine to do it that way. Anyway, the file should look something like this:

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file should contain the names of kernel modules that are
# to be loaded at boot time, one per line. Comments begin with
# a `#', and everything on the line after them are ignored.

snd-pcm-oss
snd-seq-oss
snd-mixer-oss

If the game still complains about sound, you'll have to fiddle with specific ALSA module priorities. I don't want to include all that here, that's quite a different story and HW specific.

Enjoy the game!
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marast78
 
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