how to install M.A.R.S. in ubuntu

M.A.R.S. developer Simon Schneegans explains:

"If you want to test the most recent features of M.A.R.S. which haven't been released yet, if you want to implement your own ideas or if you want to fix bugs of the game, you need to know how to compile M.A.R.S.!"

Simon continues with a neat step-by-step guide on how to compile and install the game from source in his blog post, reposted here.

Preparing

First of all, you will need the basic packages needed for compiling and cmake to generate make files. These packages can be installed via entering the following command in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake

When prompted for you password, type it and confirm with return. This will install all relevant packages on your computer.

Compiling SFML2

SFML2 is the Simple and Fast Multimedia Library M.A.R.S. uses for its basic communications with the current operating system. M.A.R.S. employs the current SVN version of SFML2 because it hasn't been released yet (in the repositories of Ubuntu is only SFML1.6).

Firstly you should install all dependencies of SFML2:

sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev libglew1.5-dev libjpeg62-dev

libpng12-dev libsndfile1-dev libxrandr-dev libopenal-dev

Secondly download a snapshot of SFML2′s repository and extract it to a directory of your choice. For the following commands I'll assume that you extracted it to your desktop.

Now, in your terminal, navigate to the extracted folder:

cd ~/Desktop/sfml2

In order to compile SFML2, you have to create a make file using cmake:

cmake .

Now compile and install SFML2:

make && sudo make install

If everything went alright, you should now have a brand new version of SFML2!

Compiling M.A.R.S.

Now on to the interesting part! Well, to be honest, it won't be much more interesting…in fact it will be nearly exactly the same procedure as above but at least, you will be finished afterwards!

Firstly you should install all additional dependencies of M.A.R.S:

sudo apt-get install libfribidi-dev

Secondly download a snapshot of M.A.R.S' repository and extract it to a directory of your choice. For the following commands I'll assume that you extracted it to your desktop.

Now, in your terminal, navigate to the extracted folder:

cd ~/Desktop/mars-game/build/

In order to compile M.A.R.S., you have to create a make file using cmake:

cmake ..

Now compile M.A.R.S.:

make && cd ..

If everything went alright, you should now have a brand new version of M.A.R.S.!

You may launch it by typing:

./mars

in the current directory or by double-clicking the executable "mars" in ~/Desktop/mars-game.

Currently "make install" doesn't work properly so you have to launch M.A.R.S out of this folder.