Installation Woes

[Loaf]

Hello,

Installation of Enigma is really frustrating. To start, I had trouble understanding all the business with the makefile part of the program which I hear is damaged.

I ended up downloading MiniGW, installing it, then installing Enigma, then running LGM and selecting the stable packages. I can't compile or run games, I just get errors and information like "Enigma isn't ready yet" or something rather.

Then I tried the dev-trunk, and whenever I open my game project the Enigma console just starts going crazy and my computer fan sounds like its going to explode. If I manage to open any game project, the compiler does the same thing; lots of console spam and very little else.

I have some questions:

- Can someone give me a reliable way to cleanly install Engima
- Why is MiniGW requiring a workaround install, shouldn't this be fixed by now?
- Whats the deal with makefile and compiling, is this even a legitimate working feature or is it just completely sloshed and un-usable?

Thanks in advance.

[TheExDeus]

You shouldn't be touching makefiles. All of that should be dealt with automatically.
What platform are you on? I guess I could package a working windows installation.  The automatic install is just broken and only newest svn works. So what we should actually do is package working installations in zips or rars and then link to them. You have to install mingw and that's, after running ENIGMA.exe everything should work.

edit: Here is windows link: http://www.filedropper.com/enigmatrunk. It is bigger than should be (because there are some random files in there and all of the .o files and stuff). When I or someone else makes a clean package then it will be smaller. But anyway, this should work. Just extract it to C: or something. Then run it. I have deleted .ey file (its a platform configuration file for ENIGMA) so it will tell you that its the first time you are running ENIGMA. It will find minGW (hopefully) and then ask you to install OpenAL (sound package which is actually optional). Then LGM will launch. At first it will say that enigma is not ready. Just look at the console on what its doing. At some point it will load everything and you will be able to compile. Then just press Enigma>Run inside an empty project. It should compile and show a white screen. If that is happening then everything is ready to go.

[Rusky]

That shouldn't be necessary, HaRRiKiRi. The stable/dev-trunk thing really should just go away since nobody really tries to keep stable working at this point. Also you're more likely to get a quick response on the IRC.

However, following the instructions on the download page, modulo the stable/dev-trunk issue, works perfectly for me. I'm not sure why you would have encountered broken makefiles or anything other than a long wait (with legitimate feedback from LGM's progress console) to download and compile the project.

[Josh @ Dreamland]

> Why is MiniGW requiring a workaround install, shouldn't this be fixed by now?
Unfortunately, we don't maintain the MinGW installer. Something is busted with it, and we haven't heard from the MinGW team on either of our bug reports.

> Can someone give me a reliable way to cleanly install Engima?
Without the automated MinGW installer, anything we rigged up would be a big hack. As far as distributing pre-built binaries, we may do this in the future, but with the engine and compiler changing as often as they do in this phase of development, it would prove to be a lot of hassle.

> Whats the deal with makefile and compiling, is this even a legitimate working feature or is it just completely sloshed and un-usable?
Compiling the engine is 100% necessary; it is how games are built. Hence, we decided to compile the engine on the user's side as well. This way, updates are seamless (provided, of course, it works in the first place).

That said, without knowing what is being printed to the console, I can't tell you for sure if the compilation is working or not. As HaRRi said, you should not need to edit the makefiles; they are designed to work on all platforms without modification. Compilation does take its toll on the processor, so it's not out of the question that your fan would be hauling for anywhere between a minute and five, depending on how old your computer is. If you don't think you've given it enough time to finish, give that a run, otherwise just paste some of the terminal output here and we'll tell you what's going on.

Cheers

[polygone]

Loaf you should use the wiki page:
http://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/Install

I just rewrote the Windows section 2 days ago with clear step by step instructions. And if you did use that page why did you use the Stable build when I clearly put to use the Dev build (I even put it in bold) 

[IsmAvatar]

We actually have been trying to keep stable working. But for some reason, the last stable that we made doesn't work anymore, even though I'm positive it did for a month after we released it. I think it has to do with mingw-get. This would probably be consistent with why it worked for a month and then suddenly stopped working - mingw-get now fetches incompatible targets.
Moral of the story, don't blame Stable, blame mingw-get.

In the meantime, I've defaulted the checkout to always use Trunk until we can get Stable sorted out (but waiting on JoshEdit until I can commit that change). Translation: I've hacked out some of the burnt pieces, but it'd be awfully nice if we could figure out why we're burning this fish, because otherwise this is just going to keep leading to more and more burned parts being hacked out until we're left with dregs and morsels of an installer/updater.


I will mention that the build process is officially documented and maintained on the Wiki:
http://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/Install#Windows
and has been updated somewhat recently to account for broken MinGW and such.