publish packages for the complete game

[franko]

This is not really an issue but I wanted to ask if it is fine to publish the packages for the game, for free. I plan to publish them on the website https://fairpublishing.org/.

To be more precise, what I plan to publish are complete packages with the executable together with the unmodified assets found in this repository, animation, level, music, sound, texture. From what I understand there are not the one of the original game but are freely available but I would like to be sure that I understand correctly.

As for the packages, from the technical point of view, they are interesting because there is an AppImage (and a plain archive) for Linux, a Windows package with a signed executable, and for macOS I have the packages for Apple Silicon and x86-64 and they are both notarized. In additional on macOS I managed to make the game play correctly on Retina display, I had to correct a problem with the mouse positioning for that.

The other nice things about the packages is that the executable doesn't need additonal DLLs or dynamic libraries as SDL 1.2, Vorbis, OpenAL are all statically linked to the executable with only the needed options for the game. For the Linux executable that's actually interesting because the executable depends only on some standard libraries like libc, X11 and does not require to have additional packages installed.

My improvements are available from https://github.com/fairpublishing/gish and I would be glad to submit the changes if they will be accepted. However I am using the Meson build system, which is excellent in my opinion but many people prefer to use Cmake. I had also to modify some minor stuff for Windows because I use gcc with MinGW64 and not visual studio.

[beandozer]

it should be fine since all of the assets in this repository are free, and personally i would really love to see this game running natively on macos without the headache of compiling it myself, since gish runs very poorly on wine. i'm not the owner of this repo so obviously i can't actually give permission, but i don't see any reason why you couldn't publish it.

[franko]

Hi @beandozer, thank you, so everything should be okay, I published the packages:

https://fairpublishing.org/index.php/en/games/fregish-a-sticky-adventure-revived

If you want to test you are welcome. The package icon could be much better but I am no artist and I didn't want to use art from the original game.

[beandozer]

Hi @beandozer, thank you, so everything should be okay, I published the packages:

https://fairpublishing.org/index.php/en/games/fregish-a-sticky-adventure-revived

If you want to test you are welcome. The package icon could be much better but I am no artist and I didn't want to use art from the original game.

i replaced the free assets with the official ones and tried doing a playthrough on my macbook, everything seems fine except gish gets squished way too easily. in a lot of levels if you just land without holding d or space you'll instantly die because the game thinks you're squished. the original game is a lot more lenient with its damage and really only damages you if you're squishing gish around his face, as opposed to freegish which damages you even if it's just a tiny part of gish that's flattened. the game is playable but platforming is much harder and a lot of the tiny sliding corridors you go through just instantly kill you if you're unlucky. another thing i noticed is that gish's body seems to reflect a lot more light from his surroundings, but that's purely visual and doesn't impact the gameplay experience. if the squishing logic was fixed, i would likely be able to play this from start to finish with no problems. as it is now, i'm at level 4-5.

[franko]

Hi, thank you for the feedback! I noticed also the problem with the ball getting squished too easily, I agree it affect nagatively the gameplay.

I would be nice if people who know the code base could some comments about that problem. Otherwise I could have a look at the code to see if there are parameters that can be adjusted but I don't have a lot of spare time in this moment. I will just keep this for when I have some time.

[beandozer]

seems like there's already a partial fix at #7, would love it if that were implemented sometime.

[franko]

Hi,

I moved to the master of the other FreeGish repository https://github.com/freegish/freegish which seems to contain more improvements in the source code, the code was even ported to SDL2 which is cool.

I made the adaptations and compiled again the game and the problem with the characters getting squished too easily is now solved. Now the play experience is actually fun. I updated the macOS packages so you may try if you want.

Please note you may need to delete the directory "~/Library/Application Support/Gish" because the new version is incompatible with the older one.

[beandozer]

game seems to be fully playable now!