Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
Sign in to follow this  
Csonicgo

"Bug" in IWAD detection in *nix (windows too?)

Recommended Posts

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but the method for detecting iwads seems to be very "interesting" in EE when running under Linux.

When any Doom game is purchased and installed from Steam, the IWAD files are named like so:DOOM.WAD, DOOM2.WAD, TNT.WAD, PLUTONIA.WAD .

The problem is, Eternity isn't seeing these IWAD files at all when they're copied to the same directory Eternity is in. When I use the -iwad command switch, Eternity works properly.

Without it, Eternity fails to start.

This is pretty fishy and I haven't been able to "fix" this by myself. What's exactly going on here?

Share this post


Link to post
esselfortium said:

Case sensitivity in Linux is dumb. That's what's going on.

Case insensitivity on Windows is dumb.

Share this post


Link to post

Heh, ok, a religious war over OS case sensitivity is not called for :P

Anyway, I'll consider adding a check for uppercase versions of the standard IWAD names, but I'm drawing the line there. The problem you get into is that near-infinite case combinations are possible. For example if you copy an IWAD from a Win9x system to a Linux partition, it would more than likely end up named Doom.wad - and I'm not going to support that because then you could equally argue I should support DOOM.wad, DooM.wad, dOOm.wad, etc etc.

Share this post


Link to post
tempun said:

Case insensitivity on Windows is dumb.


The old 16-bit FAT system used in DOS only allowed UPPERCASE FILE NAMES LIKE 8LETTERS.EXT, and with Windows 95 they introduced FAT-32 which allowed up to 256 letters in both cases, but for compatibility purpose each file also had a "short name" variant.

The case-insensitivity in Windows is a legacy of this. In fact, even now, the short name of a file can be accessed.

Fun fact: MacOS X is case-insensitive too!

ZDoom on non-Mac Unix uses three variants for all IWAD names it recognizes:
UPPERCASE
lowercase
Capitalized

So, doom2.wad, Doom2.wad and DOOM2.WAD are all valid, but DooM2.WaD or Doom2.WAD isn't.

Share this post


Link to post
tempun said:

Case insensitivity on Windows is dumb.

For normal users who don't spend their time maintaining and tinkering with computers, case insensitivity makes sense for nearly all things.

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this  
×