Look and Feel

I’ve recently made brief return forays into 3 games’ Free Trials: EQ1, EQ2 and WoW. WoW has certainly changed in ways I wouldn’t have expected – there is a little more substance to levelling up but the divides between expansions are jagged and harsh; at level 58 player lore is “dump every frickin’ quest you have and go to Outland (Burning Crusade), and then repeat at 68 when you can go to Northrend (Lich King)”. EverQuest 1 was unrecognizable to me while EQ2 just didn’t quite look the way I remembered it.

What surprised me was which game I chose to play, and my gut tells me it came down to one simple thing: Looks.

Boost: Something for everyone to hate

Time was I knew what Boost was. Now it’s big and messy. It comes with its own installer and builder (bjam)??? It seems they have decided to compromise on making it equally painful to install everywhere.

I needed to build the Regex library as a Universal static .lib (so I could link against it without injecting a dylib dependency, cause I know nothing about dylibs).

For anyone wanting to do likewise (imagine one of your colleagues has decided not to use the Lua or JavaScript regex libraries already available to them and drop the entire of Boost into the project instead… Until another of your other colleagues yelled at him in his German accent and then the first colleague pulled Boost back out of the project without removing the dependency)…

Build/install bjam (it comes with Boost) and then execute the following command:

tools/jam/src/bin.macos*/bjam -a \
  --toolset=darwin \
  --with-regex \
  --architecture=combined \
   variant=release \
   link=static \
   architecture=combined \
  stage

Your libboost_regex-xgcc40-mt-1_38.a file will be prepared in ./stage/lib.

I wanted the static version so that we don’t then have to install boost on our player’s machines.