Installing MASkinG



Supported platforms
MASkinG is being developed and tested under the following platforms: 

      - Windows with MinGW (MSVC support is not 100%)
      - Linux (tested in RedHat 9)
      - DOS with DJGPP (tested, but not very thouroughly, in a DOS box under Windows98)

The primary target used to be DJGPP, then I switched to Windows and MSVC but now I work almost exclusively with MinGW. I usually make sure the library and the examples compile on other platforms listed above but I don't guarantee with 100% they will work. Especially DOS support is being slowly dropped. The library might work in DOS or it might not.

No testing has been done on any other platform but as MASkinG is written in a very "neutral" way there is no reason it shouldn't compile on any other OS/compiler supported by Allegro.

What you need
In order to successfully compile and use MASkinG you will need the following: 

      - Allegro 4.0 or higher
      - a compiler that can compile Allegro: DJGPP for DOS or MinGW for Windows is prefered
        (if you have Linux you already have all you need)
      - AllegroFont library by Javier Gonzalez v1.8.2 or higher
      - optional: AllegroGL library for interfacing with OpenGL
Building
This depends on your compiler. If you are using GCC (DJGPP, MinGW or under Linux) go to the directory where you unzipped MASkinG (in a terminal window or DOS prompt) and type this: 

      chmod +x fixlinux.sh
      ./fixlinux.sh
or 

      fixdjgpp.bat
or 

      fixmingw.bat
for Linux, DOS/DJGPP and MinGW respectively.

Then go to the source directory and type "make" followed by "make install" to compile and install the library. In order to install under Linux you will have to be root. You can then optionally go to the examples directory and make the examples by typing "make". The compiled library is put in the /lib directory and the examples in the examples directory.

The compilation process should produce no errors (maybe a few warnings on some compilers). If you do get errors than make sure you have properly setup your compiler, Allegro and AllegroFont (see relevant documentation for details). If only "make install" fails for one reason or another (is known to have happened before) you will have to install manually. Just copy the library (either the .a or the .lib file in the lib directory) to the lib directory of your compiler (or wherever you keep your libraries) and the entire include directory in the include direcotry of your compiler.

To build the library with OpenGL support you will first need to download and install the AllegroGL library and then build MASkinG with "make ALLEGRO_GL=1" and install it with "make install ALLEGRO_GL=1". To build the examples with OpenGL support also type "make ALLEGRO_GL=1" in the examples directory (case is important). Make sure you do "make clean" before compiling the GL version if you had compiled a different version before!

MASkinG gets linked with your program statically but Allegro itself doesn't. To enable full statc linking you must build MASkinG with "make STATICLINK=1". Note that in order to be able to link statically you must also have static version of all other libraries (Allegro, AllegroFont and optionally AllegroGL).

To build MASkinG with MSVC6 or MSVC7 open the workspace file (.dsw) in the root directory and just select the targets you want to compile and hit "build" (that means if you want to build the library with AllegroGL support, select the GL target, otherwise the OpenGL examples won't compile). Note that MSVC support is currently a bit lacking as not all targets have been defined. I have no motivation to keep maintaining the MSVC project files myself. If anyone wants to do that, please contact me.

Note: If you haven't installed AllegroFont yet you may have problems with it as the installation instructions for that library are a bit vague. After you have built the library as the readme.txt file in AllegroFont's root directory says, you have to install it manually! This means you have to copy the .lib (or the .a) file and the header files to the lib and include directories of your compiler.

Note2: With some combinations of flags on some compilers some of the examples don't compile. This is a known problem. All suggestions about how it might be solved will be greatly appreciated.

The documentation of the MASkinG API (classes, methods, etc.) is auto-generated using Doc++. You can regenerate these with "make docs"

If for some reason you are missing the .dep files (e.g. if you got MASkinG off CVS) the library will still compile but if you want to work on the source code you will most likely appreciate it if the makefiles did dependency checking for you and rebuild all files that are potentially affected when you modify the source. To create the .dep files just run "make depend". In order for this to work you will also need the 'sed' command.

Examples in Linux
Not all fonts are included with the skins. A lot of skins are designed to use standard Windows fonts which are typically located in a subdirecotry called "Fonts" of the Windows directory (e.g. C:\Windows\Fonts). MASkinG will try to look in this directory if it can't find a font in the path specified in the skin configuration file. If the font still can't be found the program will use the default Allegro font. There are however a couple of solutions to this problem: 

    1. get the fonts in question and copy them into the skins directory
or 
    2. if you have Windows, mount the partition where Windows is installed
       and add an environment variable called either "windir" or "WINDIR" (without the
       quotes of course) that contains the path to your Windows directory.
Of course this is just to reduce the download size of the library and avoid any legal issues. In your own releases you should include all the fonts that you use.

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