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[./play.it] Install the Caesar games on Linux

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Hi!

This script will help you to build packages for any Debian-based distribution (Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint...) from the GOG installer.

The scripts used in this guide make use of innoextract, fakeroot, wrestool and icotool:
apt-get install innoextract fakeroot icoutils

Download the caesar3-deb.tar archive from there:
http://www.datafilehost.com/d/32234fee

Extract, follow the instructions in README and enjoy!

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Please tell me if something doesn't work on your distribution.

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More guides can be found there :
https://secure.gog.com/mix/guides_to_install_gog_games_on_gnulinux

Other than the fact you don't state what you are supposed to do with your scripts (paste them into a text editor, run them from command line ?), good guide.

The way you launch the scripts doesn't matter at all ;)
You can write them in an executable text-file, then launch it, you can copy them line-per-line in a console, but the easiest (and recommanded) way is to simply copy-paste the whole script in a console.

When copy-pasting, be aware that the first line of the first script (the one making $HOME/ceasar3-data) shouldn't be launched "as-is".
You have too change its value first.

If I were a bit better with bash scripts I would have written a prompt to avoid errors, but I'm not ;)

Anyway, any help to improve the scripts is welcome!

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To have a really easy procedure, the best way would be to propose a small .tar archive containing the four scripts : download, extract, double-click the scripts in order, done!

I'm going to buy a domain name and put these archives on a FTP server within the month if my ISP doesn't get in my way.

Thanks for the scripts but I had a lot of issues. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 x64:

in line "Depends: caesar3-data, wine | wine-unstable | wine:i386 | wine-unstable:i386 " wine complained about the "i386" parameter and wanted "any" instead

Since your commands remove the working directories I then had to backup and do everything again.

Once I finally got the .deb's built and installed it, I then didn't know how to launch it so I typed caesar3 in the unity dash. This started it but it was my zoomed in desktop with a black window for the game. I could hear sounds but mouse or keyboard input did nothing to get into the game screens. I had right-click the wine icon on the launcher to quit the game, log out, and then log back in to get my screen resolution back to normal.

I went through the above a few times and got caesar3 to run correctly if I restarted it after quitting wine and launching it while in a "zoomed in" desktop. It didn't go back to normal resolution when I quit the game though so I just decided to uninstall caesar3 (after googling the correct dpkg command.)

Thanks for your effort but it's really not a procedure very forgiving for those with beginning linux command line skills.

Wouldn't it be possible to run this game in the native linux dosbox executable after extracting its files or is wine really necessary?

Thank you for your report!
I am totally rewriting the guide just now with a new goal : "easy to use" ;)

I am going to look a bit into DOSBox.
If Caesar III can work with it, I might try to use it instead of Wine.

Anyway, in the new version Wine will not be used anymore to install the game (only to play).

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Done!

Hmmm ... I pretty sure Caesar III is Windows requiring Wine, not DOS allowing DOSBox. How do you get around using Wine to install the game? Or should I wait patiently for the new set of instructions? :) (I'm on a Mac anyway and have it working here, but I try to keep abreast of general porting methods).

EDIT: Ah I see you've posted them ... will read later :)

I didn't comment the script, but I think everything in it is quite clear ;)

To extract the data from GOG installer without using Wine, you should have a look at innoextract:
https://constexpr.org/innoextract/

You could use a dos version to run the game in Dosbox! Just search the internet for "abandoned games caesar 3". That version will run slightly better under Linux!

It would be nice to have the game ported, and given the APIs it uses, should not be too difficult.

I just found out, thanks to a fellow GOG member, that there's a port called Caesaria.