The last two days have been seeing me converting the D2X-XL project from standard C to C++. Don't get too excited though: I haven't rewritten the entire code into neat classes. All I did was to rename all c files to cpp files. The advantage of this is that I can now easily add code from tools written in C++. That means I could e.g. drop a modern renderer, physics or networking library into the game rather easily.

Another advantage is that the C++ compilers do much better error checking of the code, and I have found and fixed quite a few quirks and flaws, so code stability will increase.

Linux users who are using the automake scripts provided with the project (Makefile.am), will have to delete the contents of their autom4te.cache folders and all .deps/*.Po files found in the various subfolders of the project (e.g. ./2d/.deps/*.Po) before running autogen.sh, .configure and make.

I highly recommend using Eclipse for building D2X-XL though. If you drop the .cproject and .project files from the source archive or the SVN repository in the project's root folder, you should be able to simply import the project from that location and compile it via Eclipse. The big advantage of Eclipse is that it offers a full blown IDE from where you can easily access a debugger and various helpful tools, like e.g. a code indexer allowing you to display every symbol's declaration or jump right to it, jump to erroneous code lines logged in a "problems" window with a mouse click etc. etc. Install Subclipse and add the D2X-XL SVN repository to your workspace, and you have a very comfortable link to the source repository, too. The more I use Eclipse on Linux, the more I love it. I will create a step by step tutorial on how to set it up and import the D2X-XL project another day.