solarus-1.6: request for comments and testing

hhromic

@ellohir said in solarus-1.6: request for comments and testing:

I tried it today and it works beautifully! I played a bit of Tunics, the idea of doing a Zelda roguelike is something I had in mind from a while and it's so cool to have it on my system now :)

I'm really glad it's working fine for you! Thanks for the feedback!
I also found Tunics! a very interesting experimental game.. procedurally generated zelda dungeons!
Beware that some Solarus games are a bit too beefy for the Raspberry Pi, at least for the 3B+. I will be testing Solarus on a RPI4 as well, should work much faster!

I had one problem with the installation though. At first it seemed like Emulation Station didn't see the system, but I remembered that I'm using the systems.cfg from my home directory (I have been toying around with adding Pico-8 as a system and not a port). I just copied the system definition from /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg to ~/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg and it worked.

Ah yes, unfortunately RetroPie doesn't cover automatic system adding to custom setups. But good you sorted it out !

Looking forward to trying the other Solarus games!

Have fun! and report any problems if you find them, so we can improve the engine and/or the integration. Thanks!

ellohir

@hhromic said in solarus-1.6: request for comments and testing:

Which gamepad you used to obtain 9+10 for quitting? is that HOTKEY + START for you as well? I have an original PS3 controller and 9+10 are the PS button + START. But I'm not sure if we can assume these numbers for most controllers? can we?

Just FYI I have a 8bitdo SN30 (the SNES bluetooth one) and my keys were 10+11.

cyperghost

@hhromic I have an idroid:con and a 8bitdo Zero - for both 10+11 for Select+Start

I've a list of lots of controllers provided by older versions of Batocera - here in this link.
And it seems that PS3, XBOX360 use dedicated Hotkey+Start as 9+10
Seveal controllers using 10+11
But all in all it seems like a mess

Did you consider the usage of es_temporaryinput.cfg?
This will show the last configured PAD as input.
And everything can be read out from this file ;)
So a grep search for hotkeyenable and start should do the job.
And you can say: I've found hotkey combo value+value for PAD deviceName
If the file is not present then plugin Keyboard and make your own config.

For example in this thread

Example config

ts-x

Is there a way to install v1.6 on a RetroPie 4.3 build? I've tried a couple of different approaches with no success. I had previously installed and been using the old version (v1.4.5?). The best path so far has been to uninstall the old version, replace the setup script with the latest, and then install fresh. Run this way the process seems to download the necessary files, creates a solarus ROM directory, adds to es_systems.cfg, but then stops without an error message. I believe it's right before it begins building the files, based on a test installation I did on a dummy 4.5.1 image.

Any thoughts? Thanks for the help!

cyperghost

@ts-x What error are you receiving?
There was not much change in dependecy tree (add of libogg-dev) only

Try to upgrade your package lists with sudo apt-get update

ts-x

@cyperghost I'm not actually receiving an error message, it begins installing and returns to the install menu like the process has successfully completed. I updated the package list per your instructions, but the process still does the exact same thing. Based on my observation of a 4.5.1 install, I believe it's running into some sort of problem right before the file builds. The only file the script places under /opt/retropie/ports/solarus is solarus.sh, so attempting to open a game file yields this runcommand.log ...

Parameters: 
Executing: /opt/retropie/ports/solarus/solarus.sh "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/solarus/zelda-roth-se-1.2.1.solarus"
/opt/retropie/ports/solarus/solarus.sh: line 7: /opt/retropie/ports/solarus/bin/solarus-run: No such file or directory

ts-x

@cyperghost Caught the error message via a cell phone video...it's an issue with SDL2. I have version 2.0.5 and it's looking for 2.0.6 (RetroPie v4.4 went from 2.0.5 to 2.0.8). Is it possible to upgrade?

cyperghost

@ts-x imho yes it's possible to upgrade. If it's not a default package then you need to compile on your own. But I'm not sure if Open GLES will do its work then.

hhromic

Sorry guys for the delay replying, been a bit busy :)

@cyperghost thanks for the feedback on the controller buttons. Indeed I thought about extracting them from retroarch.cfg or EmulationStation but in the end is too much trouble considering that we are working on bringing proper gamepad support natively on Solarus anyway so I prefer to spend my efforts on that instead.

@ts-x indeed as you discovered yourself Solarus 1.6 requires SDL 2.0.6 or better which comes with Debian Stretch or better.

What you can try to do to upgrade is to backport the sdl2.sh scriptmodule from newer RetroPie (like you did for the solarus scriptmodule) and reinstall the RetroPie SDL2 package doing: sudo ./retropie_packages.sh sdl2. However I would make a backup before attempting this as I'm not sure it's gonna work reliably.

Good Luck and let us know how it went.

cyperghost

@hhromic Thanks for feedback

One question how are these buttons working? HOTKEY(START)+SELECT terminates Solarus, like the libretro-cores? Or will a menu pop up if you press HOTKEY(START) or SELECT and then you can select a menu entry to quit. If this will happen I would strongly suggest to use 9+10 as default. This will cover 90% of usecase

Sorry I can test this WE only? Currently using Windows builds but this engine is amazing!

~~Yes and as you suggested SDL2.0.8 is available as~~
Hmm I see SDL2.0.2 DEBIAN jessie build only.

@ts-x
Maybe it works with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade to get SDL working

hhromic

@cyperghost said in solarus-1.6: request for comments and testing:

@hhromic Thanks for feedback
One question how are these buttons working? HOTKEY(START)+SELECT terminates Solarus, like the libretro-cores? Or will a menu pop up if you press HOTKEY(START) or SELECT and then you can select a menu entry to quit. If this will happen I would strongly suggest to use 9+10 as default. This will cover 90% of usecase

I implemented it like in RetroArch, once the combination is detected it simply calls the shutdown routine of the engine immediately. Nothing fancy as the engine relies 99% on the Quests for user interaction therefore asking all quest makers to implement such a menu is not feasible.

Hmm I see SDL2.0.2 DEBIAN jessie build only.
@ts-x
Maybe it works with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade to get SDL working

Please note that the solution I proposed on my previous post uses RetroPie's version of SDL2 (which you should use) which is built independently of any packages in Debian.

ts-x

@hhromic + @cyperghost Thanks again for the assistance. I upgraded SDL2 on a test image per @hhromic's instructions - Solarus 1.6 does install and the 1.6 compatible versions of the two games I tried seem to operate normally. I haven't thoroughly tested, but at a minimum the SDL2 upgrade breaks N64 emulation. Given that, I'm hesitant to apply the same upgrade to my main, almost 2 years in the making 99.9% complete image.

As a fall back, I was thinking of modifying the original 4.3 script to install Solarus 1.5.3 (instead of 1.4.5) and then using the latest pre-1.6 versions of all games (dx 1.11.1, roth 1.1.0, xd 1.11.0 + xd2 1.0.5). @hhromic given what you know about the source, any reason that approach might not work? Is it worth the pre-1.6 version upgrade for all?

hhromic

@ts-x said in solarus-1.6: request for comments and testing:

I haven't thoroughly tested, but at a minimum the sld2 upgrade breaks N64 emulation.

Can you give more details about the error you get or how it "breaks"?

Maybe you can try to rebuild the n64 emulator from source after upgrading SDL so it pick-ups the newer library.

@ts-x said in solarus-1.6: request for comments and testing:

@hhromic given what you know about the source, any reason that approach might not work? Is it worth the pre-1.6 version upgrade for all?

The most important features of Solarus 1.6 is the OpenGL ES accelerated renderer. I don't know much about pre-1.6 versions as I started contributing to that project since 1.6 (to help bringing it to work on RetroPie).

cyperghost

@hhromic Do you think it is possible to configurate input keys for Solaris? Mine is totally mixed up. I can activate analog input on my controller then DPAD is working.

Button South acts as attack
Button West acts as Select Menu for inventory
Interact is Button Left....
It's playable at all but a bit messed up with my controller config.

Thanks for this jewel :D

hhromic

@cyperghost at the moment the buttons are not configurable, but as I mentioned before the next improvement in the backlog is updating the input system to use the newer SDL GameController API, which among other things allows to use gamecontrollerdb.txt files to consistently support many joypads and remappings. Many SDL-games support this already in RetroPie so users should be familiar with how this works.

So in summary, a bit of patience and it will be there soon enough :)

ts-x

@hhromic After the SDL2 upgrade, N64 games have sound but no video. I tried rebuilding the N64 emulator from source after the upgrade, but the process generated an error before finishing. I'm guessing that has something to do with incompatibility with my older version of RetroPie. Solarus 1.5.3 would not build on v4.3 either, so I'm going to stick with 1.4.5.

Thanks again for your help with this and work on bringing Solarus 1.6 to RetroPie.

cyperghost

@hhromic
I recolored the Solarus logo to SVG Transparent/White
Please download from here in SVG format!

hhromic

@ts-x said in solarus-1.6: request for comments and testing:

@hhromic After the SDL2 upgrade, N64 games have sound but no video. I tried rebuilding the N64 emulator from source after the upgrade, but the process generated an error before finishing. I'm guessing that has something to do with incompatibility with my older version of RetroPie. Solarus 1.5.3 would not build on v4.3 either, so I'm going to stick with 1.4.5.

Thanks again for your help with this and work on bringing Solarus 1.6 to RetroPie.

Sorry to hear that, I guess you will have to migrate then. Well take your time and if you need more help just ask ;)

@cyperghost said in solarus-1.6: request for comments and testing:

@hhromic
I recolored the Solarus logo to SVG Transparent/White
Please download from here in SVG format!

Thanks, but I'm a bit confused why you did this for and why I need to download it?

cyperghost

@hhromic Oh I tink I tagged you by mistake.
You can use the one colored theme for example for the Minimal Theme

or for the ArtBook Theme

hhromic

@cyperghost aah I see, indeed that looks slick !
Thanks for converting the logo.