I have been able to successfully compile Cycles3D on a fresh install of SuSE
8.1.  Here is some feedback concerning the hurdles I had to overcome.  I'm not a
programming expert on Linux, so I may have installed more libraries than
necessary.  Installing libraries must also be done as the "root" user.

First, I had to make sure that I had all the SDL development libraries installed
on my system.  SuSE always splits the run-time libraries and development
libraries into separate packages.  For example. SDL is split into the "SDL" and
the "SDL-devel" RPM packages, so I had to install the SDL-devel RPM.  I am not
sure how other distributions treat libraries, but you want to look for packages
which contain "include" files.  These files have an extension of *.h.

Second, I had to make sure that the GLU AND GL libraries were installed.  These
can be found in the mesa libraries, so I installed all the mesa libraries just
to be sure: mesa-devel, mesaglut-devel,  and mesaglu-devel.

At this point, most of the compilation was successful, but I came up with this
error upon the compilation of the final cycles3D binary:

...
...
/usr/lib/gcc-lib/i486-suse-linux/3.2/../../../../i486-suse-linux/bin/ld: cannot
find -lSM
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[3]: *** [cycles3d] Error 1

I eventually found out that the -lSM flag was referring to the libSM library
which was already on my system in the /usr/X11R6/lib/ directory.  SuSE 8.1 did
not create a necessary *.so softlink, so I had to manually create it by typing
this in the /usr/X11R6/lib directory:

ln -s libSM.so.6.0 libSM.so

Other distributions may have different versions of this library, so just make
the necessary change from libSM.so.6.0 to your library version.  You may not
even have to create this softlink, as the distribution may already create it for
you.  On SuSE 8.1, The libSM library can be found in xshared RPM.

After fixing the libSM.so softlink problem, I had to make the system aware of
the new library, so I ran "ldconfig" at the command line.

The compilation continued a little further for me, but there were other
softlinks missing.  Here is the complete list of all the softlinks I had to
create in /usr/lib/X11R6:

libICE.so -> libICE.so.6.3
libSM.so -> libSM.so.6.0
libX11.so -> libX11.so.6.2
libXaw3d.so -> libXaw3d.so.7.0
libXext.so -> libXext.so.6.4
libXi.so -> libXi.so.6.0
libXmu.so -> libXmu.so.6.2
libXt.so -> libXt.so.6.0
libxmms.so -> libxmms.so.1.2.1

After creating these links, I ran "ldconfig" once again, and then the cycles3D
binary compiled successfully.

I may have missed a library in my list, but you will see errors similar to my
earlier example.  In the earlier example, I figured out that libSM.so had to be
installed because the error stated that -lSM could not be found.  In my case,
libSM was already installed, but I had to manually create a softlink.

So, if the error states that -lEXAMPLE could not be found, then find the package
which has the library libEXAMPLE.  On SuSE 8.1, I simply did a search in YAST2
to help me find the library.  If there is not an easy way to find a library, try
typing the library name in GOOGLE.  For example, libSM.so returned me the
correct library in GOOGLE for many distributions in Linux.

As a side note, if Cycles3D runs slowly on your machine, make sure you are using
the hardware accelerated drivers and not the software-MESA drivers.  I won't go
into this here since most distributions nowadays make it easy to turn on
Hardware Accelerated drivers.

The last problem I encountered was the display of the game itself.  You can make
modifications to the display by modifying the setup.txt file in the "data"
folder.  This setup file is mostly self-explanatory, but I would recommend
changing the "FullScreenRes" value to your screen resolution.  I find that if
you make this resolution too small, the game doesn't scale to fit your screen.
The extra space is taken up with black space.

So, if you have a screen resolution of 1024x768, change the line to say
"FullScreenRes=1024x768".  Unfortunately, the screen resolutions can only be
640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, or 1280x1024.

You can also set fullscreen to OFF or ON with "FullScreen=No" or
"FullScreen=Yes".

Happy Gaming!