Goo Engine Linux Build Wrapper

This project provides a relatively comprehensive, automated toolkit for building, installing, and packaging Goo Engine (a fork of Blender with an emphasis on NPR) on Linux.

Prereqs

Before running the scripts, ensure you have the following installed on your Linux distribution (though I'm fairly certain the process should install most of these):

• Git
• Subversion (svn)
• Python 3
• Wget
• Build Essentials (GCC, Make, CMake)

Building

# Clone this wrapper repository
git clone --recursive https://github.com/linuxnoodle/goo-engine-linux-wrapper.git
cd goo-engine-linux-wrapper

# Run the main build script
chmod +x build_goo_engine.sh
./build_goo_engine.sh

This will take a stupidly long time if you don't clone recursively. I have a zip of the current lib/ files here, if you really hate using my submodule for some reason. If there's a better way of distributing this, let me know because MAN is this painful.

Installing

chmod +x install_goo_engine.sh
./install_goo_engine.sh

This will install the .desktop file, and symlink it to .local/bin. The project needs to be succesfully compiled for this to run.

Creating an AppImage

chmod +x build_appimage.sh
./build_appimage.sh

This will build an AppImage for this project. The project also needs to be succesfully compiled for this to run.

General Project Structure

├── build_goo_engine.sh    
├── build_appimage.sh      
├── install_goo_engine.sh  
├── generate_patches.sh
├── diff_ref/               # PATCH SYSTEM: If there are any changes or other breaking features, send a PR!
│   ├── _file_locations.txt # Manifest mapping patch files to target paths.
│   ├── *.from              # Original reference file.
│   ├── *.to                # Fixed reference file.
│   └── *.patch             # Generated diffs.
├── goo-engine/            
├── lib/                   
├── build_linux/           # (Generated) Compiled output (binaries).
└── build_linux_appimage/  # (Generated) Workspace for AppImage creation.

Methodology

I made this in like three hours because I thought it would be easy after trying to build this myself. I didn't make a PR to the goo-engine repo, because these patches are really janky. I'll break down the whole process for anyone trying out something similar. A lot of this wouldn't be possible without legendboyAni's explanation here, though there admittedly is a lot more I needed to do.

What I think the proper installation process is supposed to be is:

• Cloning the repo.
• Installing the requisite packages using ./build_files/build_environment/install_linux_packages.py.
• Downloading the libraries using ./build_files/utils/make_update.py --use-linux-libraries.
• Building GooEngine using make.

What the actual installation process is:

• Cloning the repo.
• Installing the requisite packages from ./build_files/build_environment/install_linux_packages.py.
• Patching ./build_files/utils/make_update.py to retry on timeout, because the servers are seemingly dogshit.
• Taking 81 years to download the libraries using ./build_files/utils/make_update.py --use-linux-libraries.
• Patching like four files either in lib/ or source/ somewhere that causes compilation errors.
• Building GooEngine using make.

It honestly wasn't that bad. The problems started when I started trying to automate the build using some scripts. I tried seeing if I could just ignore the robots.txt and download the libs through HTTP, with it somehow being even slower than just waiting out the timeout for SVN. I tried just making my own git diffs and using them here, but it was such a tedious process that I just made it modular and slammed the stuff in diff_ref/. After all that garbage, I just asked Gemini to make me an installation and AppImage generation script.

I also made another git repo just to hold the current version of the libraries, because the repo blender has here doesn't really want to plug and play, and I've already spent too long doing this.

Current Patches

• nanovdb/util/GridBuilder.h: Fixes a template compilation error (isActive -> mValueMask.isOn).
• pxr/usd/sdf/childrenProxy.h: Adds missing _Set methods required by newer compilers.
• lib/linux_x86_64_glibc_228/opencolorio/include/OpenColorIO/OpenColorIO.h: Literally just adds an include for cstdint.
• source/creator/buildinfo.c: Adds missing TIFF variables (TIFFFaxBlackCodes, etc.) to fix linker errors.
• lib/linux_x86_64_glibc_228/webp: Renames webp to libwebp so CMake doesn't yell at me.

Cleaning

chmod +x reset_build.sh
./reset_build.sh