ironseed_fpc

Iron Seed is a science-fiction DOS game from 1994, which was both developed and published by Channel 7. Gameplay is real-time, featuring trading, diplomacy, and strategy. This repository contains a free pascal version of the original source code which has been released under GPL-3.0-or-later (see LICENSE file), so the game can now be compiled and run on GNU/Linux on architectures supported by fpc (tested on x86_64 and i386). Mnalis is providing ongoing bug fixes which are being integrated into this repository, further bug fixing and contributors are welcome.

Documentation

• Documents/is.6 is a man page
• Documents/ironseed-manual.txt is old ironseed manual, not completely up-to-date
• Documents/changelog.txt contains current SDL/fpc development log.
• Documents/old_version.txt is original developers historic (DOS) version list.
• Documents/old_todo.txt is original developers historic (DOS) TODO file.
• Current TODO is online at https://github.com/mnalis/ironseed_fpc/issues

Prerequisites

For compiling, you need:

• fpc (Free pascal compiler, apt-get install fpc)
• gcc (GNU C Compiler, apt-get install build-essential gcc
• SDL2 (Simple DirectMedia Layer 2.x, apt-get install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-mixer-dev)

For making changes to game (rebuilding datafiles), you may also need:

• (optionally) D compiler (The D compiler is required to the conversation and log conversion tools, apt-get install ldc / apt-get install gdc or https://digitalmars.com/d/2.0/)
• (optionally) perl & imagemagick (for screen conversion utilities, apt-get install perl imagemagick)

Debian packages and prebuilt game

• source for Debian packages can be found on https://mentors.debian.net/package/ironseed/ Just do dget -x https://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/i/ironseed/ironseed_XXXX.dsc on the latest .dsc file, and debuild (from devscripts package) to rebuild. Packaging information is being maintained on https://salsa.debian.org/mnalis/ironseed

• prebuilt .deb packages for Debian Buster can also often be found at https://github.com/mnalis/ironseed_fpc/releases

Compilation

Just typing make will compile whichever developers think is currently the best. You can also force the version to build, by make debug_sdl for SDL-only version.

There is also no-seatbelts targets release_sdl but it is not recommended at the moment as it does not have anti-data-corruption checks, so bugs could creep up in your savefiles! Or, just for fun, you can also build demo_sdl, which is original shareware demo restricted version.

Running from build directory for test

./is

Installing

make all install

Creating Debian package

sudo apt-get install devscripts; debuild

Old savegames

Previously, savegames resided in data/savegame.dir and save? subdirectories in build directory. They now reside in ~/.local/share/ironseed (or ~/.ironseed).

Debug

see Documents/debug_notes.md