Creatures Internet Edition

Nothing exciting to say about installing the game & running it with the bundled SDL-1.2.

But things get really nasty if you want to use your system libraries & sdl12-compat in particular…

mkdir libs_backup
mv libSDL-1.2.so.0 libSDL_mixer-1.2.so.0 libsmpeg-0.4.so.0 libs_backup/

$ creatures3
Welcome to Creatures 3!
Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-version.c: 204: _dl_check_map_versions: Assertion `needed != NULL' failed!

lc2e is a very old ELF binary, and unfortunately it is very broken by modern standards:

• it contains explicit symbol-version requirements against libdl.so.2 (readelf -V lc2e)
• but it doesn't declare a dependency on libdl.so.2 (readelf -d lc2e)

You can use patchelf to fix this:

patchelf --add-needed libdl.so.2 lc2e

But why does it work with the bundled libSDL-1.2.so.0 ?

Because the bundled libSDL-1.2.so.0 has a dependency on libdl (and that makes the loader happy), while any modern versions (be it a real SDL-1.2 or sdl12-compat) won't have it. Again: why ?

Because with the release of GLIBC 2.34 in 2021, libpthread, libdl, libutil, libanl have all been integrated into libc; new build does not link with them anymore.

$ creatures3
Welcome to Creatures 3!
lc2e: symbol lookup error: /home/twolife/games/creatures3/lc2elib.so: undefined symbol: SDL_RateSLOW

This is a fun one. lc2elib.so use some private symbols that are not part of SDL-1.2’s public ABI, that are exported by the bundled libSDL-1.2.so.0, but that aren't exposed in any build of SDL-1.2 made in the last 2 decades.

Here is the list of symbols:

void SDL_Convert16LSB(SDL_AudioCVT *cvt, Uint16 format)
void SDL_Convert16MSB(SDL_AudioCVT *cvt, Uint16 format)
void SDL_Convert8(SDL_AudioCVT *cvt, Uint16 format)
void SDL_ConvertEndian(SDL_AudioCVT *cvt, Uint16 format)
void SDL_ConvertMono(SDL_AudioCVT *cvt, Uint16 format)
void SDL_ConvertSign(SDL_AudioCVT *cvt, Uint16 format)
void SDL_ConvertStereo(SDL_AudioCVT *cvt, Uint16 format)
void SDL_RateDIV2(SDL_AudioCVT *cvt, Uint16 format)
void SDL_RateMUL2(SDL_AudioCVT *cvt, Uint16 format)
void SDL_RateSLOW(SDL_AudioCVT *cvt, Uint16 format)