Feature request: Mac/Linux support

[Boobies]

Would it be possible to include a Linux port of Open Minecraft Note Block Studio? Perhaps in the form of a .deb package or something.

[encode42]

I've been able to install and run the EXE through the latest version of wine on Linux Mint just fine.

Edit:
Forgot to mention that it works perfectly fine so far.

[HielkeMinecraft]

Yeah right now the best thing you can do is to use Wine, as many things have been made with Windows in mind, and won't work on Linux.

[Boobies]

Wow, this is suddenly looking like a forum rather than a bug tracker :) I wasn't looking for a workaround, guys; I've been using Wine too.

[HielkeMinecraft]

Upon further inspection of the code, I think it's pretty much impossible.
Just look at the .dll files at OpenNoteBlockStudio/datafiles/Data/

These files obviously won't work on Linux, and because I don't have the source code for them, making .so variants to work on Linux is... Impossible.

[Boobies]

I thought perhaps they came with GameMaker Studio, which I am not particularly familiar with. Do you know who the author is? Perhaps we can contact the auhor for help (either for the source or the shared object files). And, for that matter, aren't there potential licensing issues surrounding those files?

[HielkeMinecraft]

No, as in the code they are specified as libraries. You can find a lot of them online: http://www.gmtoolbox.com/
I have no idea who made these files and what the licenses they have. Your guess is as good as mine :-/

[Boobies]

Chances are they do Windows-specific things anyway judging from their names (e.g., window.dll) so it's possibly not as simple as providing .so's. Otherwise, we could have used objcopy. Could you identify where in the code these are used? If it's not a million functions being used, perhaps I could reimplement them using portable libraries.

[HielkeMinecraft]

As far as I know the .dll files are only loaded in once, in lib_init. There they are put into global variables. If you were to make .so variants that would do exactly the same thing as the .dll ones, we could just have a check, and if the platform is linux, the .so files will be used. But is that even possible, without having the source code? :-/

Still, this is just one thing that won't work on Linux. More things might be broken.

[Boobies]

The main reason why it's done this way, as far as I can tell, is that GML is a dumb language which doesn't abstract away calling conventions and such. At any rate, it would be possible, because it would not rely on those libraries at all; I would implement the functionality myself from scratch --- as long as it's not too much work (I expect that while those libraries have a lot of features, not too many are used by this specific program).

That said, in the mean while, I have tracked down one of the libraries. It seems to have its full source code available, and support is included Linux as well as macOS:

https://marketplace.yoyogames.com/assets/575/execute-shell

As far as I can tell, everything from file.dll and window.dll can easily be done using GameMaker's built-in functions. I haven't investigated further.

[stuffbydavid]

Hi, here are the sources for the DLLs you need to port:

https://github.com/stuffbydavid/audio-DLL
https://github.com/stuffbydavid/midi-input-DLL
https://github.com/stuffbydavid/window-DLL
https://github.com/stuffbydavid/file-DLL

window.dll and midiinput.dll use Windows features like ShowWindow and midiInGetDevCaps, so they'll need to be rewritten from scratch. audio.dll and file.dll use the FFMPEG and Boost libraries which are cross-platform and require less changes.

Good luck!!

[Boobies]

You must be the original author :)

At any rate, if anything takes too much work to port, I'll also consider looking into how ditficult it is to replace them with cross-platform alternatives. Any idea as to how tight the coupling between these and Open Minecraft Note Block Studio is? Cause if it's just a matter of changing some calls and data structures, things should progress very quickly.

I haven't really looked at the APIs yet.

[leafs444]

I know this is kinda necrotic but this isn't a forum so I have no reason not to tell y'all that I found a way to pretty much make this run without a compatibility layer (WINE (If its not an emulator then its a compatibility layer)) but I can't legally share it so... But it is possible...

[ShinkoNet]

Could you explain the method in doing so? I'm interested in doing this.