Okay, I've spent the past 3 days trawling through the forums here there and everywhere and can't find a simple or concise answer to my questions.
(1) Is there anywhere, a list of steps you have to go through to convert a SMAUG FUSS or SWR FUSS into a suitable format so it can be compiled with Visual C.
(2) Is there a stock SWR and SWRFotE somewhere which can be extracted and run, all the implementations i've found give loads of VNUM errors on startup or are missing significant area files.
Please don't suggest installing cygwin. I have installed it before and really don't like it. I don't like the idea of having to have the cygwin dlls in place just so i can run the MUD. I'm not a C expert (or amateur come to think of it) at all, but I am more familiar with Visual C than Cygwin anyday even if that means I am still a novice.
I have applied several snippets quite successfully to the WIN32 SMAUG source provided by Nick on here so I am no stranger to applying snippets (or coding for that matter).
The SWRFUSS v1.1 release will run as is. I just tested with the latest version, including a clean make. There were "errors" in the area files, yes, but these are not really error, just poorly built areas. The stock areas in SWR are riddled with cross referenced resets, and these are the "errors" that are reported: the objects/mobs are there, but have not been loaded yet. Since the resets are not activated until much later in the boot process, this makes little difference other than a messy boot log. There are also some errors about clan store rooms, but again, this does not stop the mud from booting.
There are a couple things that I beleive you need to change to compile in MSVC, like disabling some warnings through the pragma directive, as well as differences in header names. You could probably look at the WIN32 versions to see what they are.
If you do do these steps, please record them and share them with everyone else. If your willing to do the work(and since you have access to the compiler), Samson may include the changes if it increases the platforms that it will compile on, though thats entirely up to him and I can't say for sure.
Since I don't like the fact that there are boot errors at all, I have gone though and made this file:
www.darkwarriors.net/downloads/boot_fixes.tgz
It contains copies of the area files that give the reset errors, files for the different clans to correct the clan vault messages, as well as copies of mud.h, db.c, and tables.c that do not contain the make_missile commands, since this command does not exist in the source code. If you copy if to your root directory and extract it, it will overwrite the old files, and it should produce a clean booting swr1.1fuss.
P.S. Make a backup of your files, as I take no responsibility if this causes your computer to melt.
If you install MinGW - minimal GNU for Windows (www.mingw.org) you can compile using gcc and all that fun stuff, and not have the cygwin dlls to run the directory.
That being said, it sounds like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. Unless you completely port all system-dependent syscalls, then you really are stuck with Cygwin or something close to it. Fortunately, there isn't a whole lot to port.
IIRC, the main problem areas are:
- network code
- directory reading code
- system signals, the notion of which doesn't exist under Windows, I think
- a few misc. syscalls here and there
And just for the record - yes. If someone does provide me with what's needed to make it compile and run under Visual C/C++ I'd me more than happy to include it in the base package.