Compiling re3/miami on linux

tl;dr

need

  • Steam install of OG Vice City (or patched retail, just the copy paths on the end change)
  • cmake
# get repo
wget -q https://archive.org/download/github.com-GTAmodding-re3_-_2021-09-06_14-11-00/GTAmodding-re3_-_2021-09-06_14-11-00.bundle
git clone GTAmodding-re3_-_2021-09-06_14-11-00.bundle re3
cd re3
git fetch -u ../GTAmodding-re3_-_2021-09-06_14-11-00.bundle 'refs/*:refs/*'
git checkout miami

# get vendor libs
git submodule update --init --recursive

# get system libs (might need more, see cmake output)
sudo apt-get install libopenal-dev libglfw3-dev libmpg132-dev libopengl-dev

# build
take build
cmake -DLIBRW_PLATFORM=GL3 ..
make -j$(nproc)

# copy files
cp ./src/reVC ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Grand\ Theft\ Auto\ Vice\ City/reVC
cp -R ../gamefiles/* ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Grand\ Theft\ Auto\ Vice\ City

# run
cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Grand\ Theft\ Auto\ Vice\ City
./reVC

I’ve recently got an urge to play GTA:Vice City again. Maybe to just cruise along and rock out to the best soundtrack ever or to try some speedrun strats.

I’ve heard of the reimplementation of Vice City by the GTA Modding community and was impressed by their efforts to bring such an old game on any device.

Sadly, Take Two issued a DMCA complaint against their public codebase. No matter, I had my own clone of the repo and plenty of people were still hosting their “presumably illegal” clones.

The main repository is still under DMCA takedown, but since when you post something on the internet it’s there forever, the Internet Archive snagged a copy just before takedown and it’s available at The Internet Archive;

Since taking on T2 lawyers would be a lengthy, costly (and probably stupid TBH) undertaking I undestand that contesting this takedown is outside of the possibilites of the people that worked hard on such a monumental task.

I firmly stand behind the idea that reverse engineering is a right and as long as you don’t profit as a competitior against the original authors, you hsould be allowed to go anything you please with the software or devices you paid for.

The law is pretty sketchy around these parts, so I would recommend you to read

Since I’ve cracked a few pieces of software myself I know that reversing is an art and should be respected, not prosecuted.

The Definitive Edition

Not long after, T2 announced the Trilofy Definitive Edition. Plenty of people were understandably excited. Not me, really, because I knew they would include some bullshit DRM that won’t work without ring 0 access on windows.

But oh boy, noone was ready for the shit they would put out.

Grove Street Games, clearly understaffed, overworked and feature-crept were forced to put out a clearly mangled version. Some (not all) issues are beatufily and clearly demonstrated in a 2-parter by Vadim M narrated by BadgerGoodger.

R* apologised and promised to fix the most glaring issues. To be fair, some were fixed, but pushing 4 patches in nearly 2 years and never fixing keybinding issues is a clear sign of… ignorance? Incompetence? Carelessness?

The technical aspect of the remasters is interesting and clearly a product of poeple that care and have plenty of know how and balls to run two game engines in parallel and use AI for texture upscaling (source, couldn’t find the original).

Thus, IMHO, the blame in on T2 for pushing out unfinished software, not on Grove Street Games for trying to implement three huge games at once. But since it looks like that T2 and R* aren’t spending any of the gambling GTA 5 online money on continued development of Definitive Edition, it seems that we won’t get another No Man’s Sky story.

Skip the Story, Let’s Compile

OK, let’s get the archive.

$ take re3-miami
$ wget https://archive.org/download/github.com-GTAmodding-re3_-_2021-09-06_14-11-00/GTAmodding-re3_-_2021-09-06_14-11-00.bundle
$ file GTAmodding-re3_-_2021-09-06_14-11-00.bundle
GTAmodding-re3_-_2021-09-06_14-11-00.bundle: Git bundle

It’s a git bundle, so let’s clone it into our own repo.

$ git clone GTAmodding-re3_-_2021-09-06_14-11-00.bundle re3
$ cd re3
$ git log --oneline | head -5
3233ffe1 Merge pull request #1233 from madebr/cmake-fixes
3569b7ed Fix ped comments on oal
a15d5589 Fix reflection counter
d23c045d Audio: small refactoring
3bc6aa85 Audio: a bit more PS2 changes

Comparing to other mirrors, the merge of PR#1233 is indeed the last commit.

Next, let’s checkout the miami branch. This will require for us to pull refs from remote/bundle.

$ git checkout miami
error: pathspec 'miami' did not match any file(s) known to git
$ git fetch -u ../GTAmodding-re3_-_2021-09-06_14-11-00.bundle 'refs/*:refs/*'
From ../GTAmodding-re3_-_2021-09-06_14-11-00.bundle
 * [new ref]           origin/miami -> origin/miami
 * [new ref]           origin/lcs   -> origin/lcs
$ git checkout miami
Branch 'miami' set up to track remote branch 'miami' from 'origin'.
Switched to a new branch 'miami'

We could also checkout origin/miami but doesn’t really matter.

We got CMakeLists.txt and premake, I’m used to cmake and I already have it installed.

$ cmake ..
-- Building reVC GIT SHA1: a16fcd8d6a79e433c1c6e73d540f1bbe27e14164
-- REVC_AUDIO = OAL (choices=OAL)
-- LIBRW_PLATFORM = NULL (choices=NULL;GL3)
CMake Error at /somrlik/Apps/cmake-3.25.1-linux-x86_64/share/cmake-3.25/Modules/FindOpenAL.cmake:116 (set_target_properties):
  IMPORTED_LIBNAME property value

    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libopenal.so

  may not contain '/'.
Call Stack (most recent call first):
  src/CMakeLists.txt:56 (find_package)


-- Checking for one of the modules 'mpg123'
-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!

Oh, so we will need to get some headers and libs on our system. We could of course download and install them separately, but since I’m lazy and Ubuntu provides a lot of packages, I will install the prerequisites using apt.

You can get the prerequisites from sources, compile, link and provide headers for cmake yourselves.

Ubuntu development packages are usually in the format of lib[NAME]-dev. After installing one, I try to run cmake again and again until all libraries are available.

For me the missing libraries were openal, glfw3 and mpg132, you might need more. Probably opengl I would hazard a guess.

$ sudo apt-get install libopenal-dev libglfw3-dev libmpg132-dev
[ --- normal apt-get output, nothing interesting --- ]

After running cmake again:

$ take build
$ cmake ..
-- The C compiler identification is GNU 9.4.0
[ --- lines ommited ---]
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:45 (add_subdirectory):
  The source directory

    /somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/vendor/librw

  does not contain a CMakeLists.txt file.
[ --- lines ommited ---]
-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!

We will need to get librw which is a OSS reimplementation of the RenderWare engine. Fortunately the source is added as a git module, so we just need to fetch the modules.

$ git submodule update --init --recursive
Submodule 'vendor/librw' (https://github.com/aap/librw.git) registered for path 'vendor/librw'
Submodule 'vendor/ogg' (https://github.com/xiph/ogg.git) registered for path 'vendor/ogg'
Submodule 'vendor/opus' (https://github.com/xiph/opus.git) registered for path 'vendor/opus'
Submodule 'vendor/opusfile' (https://github.com/xiph/opusfile.git) registered for path 'vendor/opusfile'
Cloning into '/somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/vendor/librw'...
Cloning into '/somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/vendor/ogg'...
Cloning into '/somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/vendor/opus'...
Cloning into '/somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/vendor/opusfile'...
Submodule path 'vendor/librw': checked out '5501c4fdc7425ff926be59369a13593bb6c81b54'
Submodule path 'vendor/ogg': checked out '684c73773e7e2683245ffd6aa75f04115b51123a'
Submodule path 'vendor/opus': checked out '6bae366f9fef25191fc812c430e8abd40a13a233'
Submodule path 'vendor/opusfile': checked out '6452e838e68e8f4fc0b3599523c760ac6276ce89'

Let’s try cmake again.

$ cmake ..
-- Building reVC GIT SHA1: a16fcd8d6a79e433c1c6e73d540f1bbe27e14164
-- REVC_AUDIO = OAL (choices=OAL)
-- LIBRW_PLATFORM = NULL (choices=NULL;GL3)
-- Checking for one of the modules 'mpg123'
-- Configuring done
-- Generating done
-- Build files have been written to: /somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/build

Nice, let’s make!

$ make
[ --- a lot of warnings --- ]
In file included from /somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/src/core/common.h:58,
                 from /somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/src/animation/AnimBlendAssocGroup.cpp:1:
/somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/src/fakerw/rwcore.h: At global scope:
/somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/src/fakerw/rwcore.h:17:13: error: ‘RWDEVICE’ in namespace ‘rw’ does not name a type
   17 | typedef rw::RWDEVICE::Im2DVertex RwIm2DVertex;
      |             ^~~~~~~~
[ --- a lot more errors and warnings ---]
make[2]: *** [src/CMakeFiles/reVC.dir/build.make:76: src/CMakeFiles/reVC.dir/animation/AnimBlendAssocGroup.cpp.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:175: src/CMakeFiles/reVC.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [Makefile:91: all] Error 2

This is a bit harder to debug, so I will spare you the process.

When librw is compiled with LIBRW_PLATFORM = NULL, RWDEVICE is not defined, since there is no rendering device. From cmake output, we can see that the possible values are NULL,GL3

-- LIBRW_PLATFORM = NULL (choices=NULL;GL3)

presuming GL3 stands for OpenGL 3 we can regenerate makefiles by passing the option to cmake

$ cmake -DLIBRW_PLATFORM=GL3 ..
-- Building reVC GIT SHA1: a16fcd8d6a79e433c1c6e73d540f1bbe27e14164
-- REVC_AUDIO = OAL (choices=OAL)
-- LIBRW_PLATFORM = GL3 (choices=NULL;GL3)
-- LIBRW_GL3_GFXLIB = GLFW (choices=GLFW;SDL2)
-- Found OpenGL: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libOpenGL.so
-- Checking for one of the modules 'mpg123'
-- Configuring done
-- Generating done
-- Build files have been written to: /somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/build

Okay, let’s make!

$ time make -j$(nproc)
[ --- compiler output omitted ---]
[ 66%] Linking CXX executable reVC
[100%] Built target reVC
make -j$(nproc)  48,99s user 5,19s system 966% cpu 5,606 total

Our executable is src/reVC.

$ cd src
$ ./reVC
cdvd_stream: can't get filesystem info

REVC ASSERT FAILED
	File: /somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/src/core/CdStreamPosix.cpp
	Line: 206
	Function: CdStreamInit
	Expression: 0
[DBG]: size of matrix 80
[DBG]: size of placeable 80
[DBG]: size of entity 120
[DBG]: size of building 120
[DBG]: size of dummy 128
casepath couldn't find dir/file "neo", full path was neo/neo.txd
casepath couldn't find dir/file "text", full path was text/russian.gxt
casepath couldn't find dir/file "TEXT", full path was /somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/build/src\TEXT\
casepath couldn't find dir/file "AMERICAN.GXT", full path was AMERICAN.GXT
[1]    1103042 segmentation fault (core dumped)  ./reVC

Well, the executable runs, but segfaults. Seems we’re missing the original files, so let’s just copy the executable in the root of our original Vice City install. I’m using the Steam release.

There is no install target in the generated Makefile (in fact, there is just one target) so I will be copying everything by hand.

$ cp ./reVC ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Grand\ Theft\ Auto\ Vice\ City/reVC
$ ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Grand\ Theft\ Auto\ Vice\ City/reVC
[ --- the same as above --- ]
[1]    1103206 segmentation fault (core dumped)  ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Grand\ Theft\ Auto\ Vice\ City/reVC

After some digging around in the repo, I found the missing files in gamefiles directory in root of repo, so I just copied them.

$ cp -R ../../gamefiles/* ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Grand\ Theft\ Auto\ Vice\ City
$ ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Grand\ Theft\ Auto\ Vice\ City/reVC
[ --- the same as above --- ]
[1]    1103206 segmentation fault (core dumped)  ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Grand\ Theft\ Auto\ Vice\ City/reVC

After some more digging, I found out that CWD matters for reVC. Writing a patch for this probably wouldn’t be hard. But sure, let’s run it “properly”.

$ cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Grand\ Theft\ Auto\ Vice\ City
$ ./reVC

Violá.

Maybe We Are Done

Skip this part if reVC runs fine now. The following issues are probably related just to me.

If you were greeted with

[DBG]: cdvd_stream: read info 0x55b8e7836dd0
[DBG]: Using one streaming thread for all channels
[DBG]: size of matrix 80
[DBG]: size of placeable 80
[DBG]: size of entity 120
[DBG]: size of building 120
[DBG]: size of dummy 128
[DBG]: Created cdstream thread
[DBG-2]: [/somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/src/skel/glfw/glfw.cpp.psInitialize:484]: gGameState = GS_START_UP
casepath couldn't find dir/file "gta_vc.set", full path was gta_vc.set
[DBG-2]: Default skin set as no other skins are available OR saved skin not found!
[DBG]: Physical memory size 3675533312
[DBG]: Available physical memory 1456480256
OpenGL version: 4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 21.2.6
casepath couldn't find dir/file "gta_vc.set", full path was gta_vc.set
X Error of failed request:  BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
  Major opcode of failed request:  40 (X_TranslateCoords)
  Resource id in failed request:  0xb01d0d
  Serial number of failed request:  197
  Current serial number in output stream:  197

you are as stumped as I was.

After some debugging, I found this glfw commit that presumably fixes this issue. Okay, the version supplied by canonical probably predates this commit and updating GLFW in my system to another version and potentionally breaking other packages is not something I want to do.

TBH, I don’t know if it is just me, but I’ve always had issues when using GLFW. But I’ve had success using SDL!

Luckily, librw allows you to choose the frontend (backend?) for the OpenGL rendering and the choices are GLFW and SDL2!

So, let’s get SDL2

$ sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev
$ cmake -DLIBRW_PLATFORM=GL3 -DLIBRW_GL3_GFXLIB=SDL2 ..
$ make -j12
[ --- compiler output --- ]
/somrlik/projects/re3-miami/re3/src/skel/crossplatform.h:66:5: error: ‘GLFWwindow’ does not name a type
   66 |     GLFWwindow* window;
[ --- compiler output --- ]
make: *** [Makefile:91: all] Error 2

Oh, so librw can use SDL2 but re3 requires GLFW.

So, GLFW it is then.

Like I said, I won’t be updating the system-wide GLFW, so I chose to build the newest release of GLFW3 from source.

For those interested, the issue might be related to running a tiling window manager with no window decorations, but I tested both with and without window decorations and in my case compiling with or without commit fe57e3c doesn’t make a difference.

So let’s visit releases and see that the latest version is 3.3.8. My system has 3.3.2 installed, which I found out by adding

printf("GLFW version: %s\n", glfwGetVersionString());

to /vendor/librw/src/gl/gl3device.cpp and recompiling. This seemed like the simplest way, since I already had everything open.

Since it’s a vendor lib, let’s add it to vendor:

I could have also added it as another git module, but dealing with git modules is IMO a bit of a hassle.

$ TEMPFILE=$(mktemp)
$ wget -qO "${TEMPFILE}" https://github.com/glfw/glfw/releases/download/3.3.8/glfw-3.3.8.zip
$ unzip -u -d ./vendor/ "${TEMPFILE}"
$ rm "${TEMPFILE}"

Since I won’t be installing GLFW system wide, I chose a different install prefix, ./pfx for simplicity,

$ cd ./vendor/glfw-3.3.8
$ take build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=./pfx ..
$ make
$ make install

Oh, GLFW compiles some tests to the tests folder by default. Let’s try them!

$ ./tests/glfwinfo
GLFW header version: 3.3.8
GLFW library version: 3.3.8
GLFW library version string: "3.3.8 X11 GLX EGL OSMesa clock_gettime evdev"
[--- more info about OpenGL and Vulkan ---]
$ ./tests/windows

The last one even opens a window! And it works!

Compiling 3.3.2 and trying to run ./tests/windows works but ./tests/inputlag fails with the same error as above. No clue what is really happening.

Let’s make install and see what is included in out installation.

$ make install
$ tree pfx
pfx
├── include
│   └── GLFW
│       ├── glfw3.h
│       └── glfw3native.h
└── lib
    ├── cmake
    │   └── glfw3
    │       ├── glfw3Config.cmake
    │       ├── glfw3ConfigVersion.cmake
    │       ├── glfw3Targets.cmake
    │       └── glfw3Targets-noconfig.cmake
    ├── libglfw3.a
    └── pkgconfig
        └── glfw3.pc

6 directories, 8 files

We have the lib/pkgconfig/glfw3.pc that will tell cmake where to find our version of GLFW, so we’re golden.

Let’s just point cmake to our GLFW installation and compile re3 again.

$ cd ../../../build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=../vendor/glfw-3.3.8/build/pfx -DLIBRW_PLATFORM=GL3 -DLIBRW_GL3_GFXLIB=GLFW ..
$ time make -j$(nproc)
[ --- at lot of compiler ouput --- ]
[100%] Built target reVC
make -j$(nproc)  91,80s user 10,10s system 991% cpu 10,272 total

Copying the files over and running ./reVC the screen blinks and

Done

Screenshot of Vice City with debugging info from re3

And we’re done. I hope you didn’t encounter my issues with GLFW and you have a copy of reVC running on your machine.

Be sure to thank everyone who contributed to the original code.

Have fun hacking around the code and maybe I will try to write some mods myself too.

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