Compiling OpenTyrian under Ubuntu

I suspect that every one of you has some childhood memories about computer games. Recently I discovered that one the games which was iconic for me at the time, was released as freeware. I'm talking about Tyrian. Not only was it released as freeware, but the full source was made available (together with the artwork!).

While installing you can get in mood by listening to the Tyrian jukebox. Sidenote: isn't Charlie Crowe's "Vegas Hard Rock Shuffle" very similar to the ingame music? (you can listen to it on his myspace page - scroll in ~40 seconds to see what I'm talking about).

OpenTyrian is a recreation of the game. It has binaries for Windows and MacOS X and below I include the build instructions for Ubuntu (although it should be fairly similar for other Linux variants).

Install the needed packages:

sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion libsdl1.2-debian libsdl-net1.2 libsdl-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev

Check out the source code. You can either check out the classic version (which includes all the features of the original game) or the enhanced version (which is work in progress, and it may or may not work). As the GoogleCode page says:

To check out the classic source code:

svn checkout http://opentyrian.googlecode.com/svn/classic/trunk/ opentyrian-read-only

To check out the enhanced source code:

svn checkout http://opentyrian.googlecode.com/svn/enhanced/trunk/ opentyrian-read-only 

Now build the source code:

cd opentyrian-read-only
make

Now download the artwork and unzip it. If the specified URL doesn't work, you can try the following two alternatives:

• http://camanis.net/tyrian/tyrian21.zip
• http://darklomax.org/tyrian/tyrian21.zip

wget http://sites.google.com/a/camanis.net/opentyrian/tyrian/tyrian21.zip
mkdir data
unzip -j tyrian21.zip -d data

And finally: enjoy!

./tyrian

PS. An other very important (for me) game is also freeware: One Must Fall 2097. Get it at the official website.