Hey, I just read your article on Gamasutra. Inspiring stuff – I agree that Shiren is The Good Stuff, and I had to laugh at the concept of Obatarian (is the O- in this case an honorary prefix? that would make it even more hilarious).
Less exalting is the fact that Voyage crashes on my Eee PC netbook (running Debian "wheezy"). With Sun's java (version 6), I get no display at all. With openjdk (version 7u25-2.3.10-1~deb7u1), I get a small window that plays some music and displays a few logos, before cutting to a forest scene, that I only get a glimpse of before the application crashes. I'll paste the error message below, in its entirety.
I've got an old Mac sitting at home with Debian on it as well, so I'll see if I won't get the opportunity to try it on that machine during the weekend or something.
As always,
Minotauros
Hey Minotauros,
Sorry about all this! I've never seen this sort of thing on the machines I regularly test on.
Looks like SUN's Java may not be playing nice with the lwjgl library. I've only tested with openjdk -- I think the openjdk-6-jdk package in the Ubuntu software center to build, and openjdk-6-jre & openjdk-7-jre to run, although -jdk also has the runtime stuff, so either one should work I think. I've tested Linux mostly on my own notebook (HP dv4) from pendrive Linux Ubuntu 12.04 (I think), so after booting it seems to take a while for the Ubuntu software center to pick up the very latest openjdk packages from the "Universe" repository.
Anyway, that's just background info. The main problem in your error output seems to be the "Texture too big..." line. I guess either the graphics card (or chipset since it's a notebook) can't handle the owl sprite texture -- which isn't big at all.
I did a bit of googling and saw people saying to update lwjgl.so (Java OpenGL library), but the one I've included seems to be fairly recent (2.8.4). OK, just checked and there IS a newer version
available from Sourceforge here. You could try dropping the linux lwjgl.so and lwjgl64.so into the lib directories for the Voyage installation, but it's a long shot whether that would fix the problem.
Also, fiddling with the graphics chipset settings may or may not help.
If your Mac with Debian has an Intel based CPU, you could try the game on that. Unfortunately, the whole Voyage for Linux build assumes Intel/x86 based CPUs for now.
I'll also google some more and see if I can find other ideas or fixes. Feel free to email me at the
address on the download page (just below the Sellbox button) in the meantime.
Again, sorry about the problem! And stay tuned.
EDIT: - if you try that latest lwjgl from Sourceforge, you should probably also copy lwjgl.jar (from jar/) into the Voyage jars directory (in addition to the native/linux/lwjgl.so & native/linux/lwjgl64.so into the Voyage lib directory)
- if you don't mind more experimentation, you could make a pendrive Ubuntu USB stick (4GB should be sufficient) with either
YUMI or
unetbootin to see if Ubuntu can run Voyage on your hardware. I've had success with Ubuntu 12.04_Live, but as I wrote above, you'll have to wait and otherwise convince the Software Center application to look for openjdk on the Universe repository - sometimes it won't find openjdk-7-jre initially, then does after a minute or two, then finds a newer version of it after another minute!?