Once that happens look for an active process named "hwengine".

You should also find a debug0.txt within your home directory (not 100% on unix path right now - somewhere like ~/home/.hedgewars/ or so). Upload it somewhere (if there is something in there) and link us to it.

Something different to test: Click on single player, then custom game (top right button) and then look if there's a valid map preview showing some kind of island/cave.

One possible reason for this is the NPOTT OpenGL feature which apparently has poor (to put it mildly) support on at least some nvidia drivers.

Is worth noting it appears to work in my nvidia under Karmic at least. I have not tested Jaunty.

Anyway, if the last line of ~/.hedgewars/debug0.txt is:
0: OpenGL: GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE: 8192
Then it is the NPOTT problem.
I've asked João Pinto to update the 0.9.12 Ubuntu package with the patches in:
http://hedgewars.org/node/1797#comment-11353

Which hopefully will resolve this.
If you don't want to wait, you can try building it yourself. I tried to put all the commands in the link above.

Thanks for the replies.

Nothing, all I see is one hedgewars process with three subprocesses

`-hedgewars,23804
    |-{hedgewars},23805
    |-{hedgewars},23808
    `-{hedgewars},23809

For some reason this file isn't being created, but the .hedgewars folder is. Is there a command-line option I can use to force this file to be generated? Or a signal I can send?

It sort of works. When I first enter the screen, the preview box in the upper left is blank and the Map dropdown says "generated map...". If I select a new map, such as Blox, then I get a preview of that particular map. If I go back to "generated map..." the box does not update. Not sure if that is intended behavior.

If I select a custom map from the dropdown, I'm still unable to start a game properly (goes back to the "in game..." text and nothing else).

For some totally random reason I couldn't get cmake to finish because it complains that it cannot find a Pascal compiler despite the fact I had fpc installed and available in $PATH. *shrug*.

WRT fpc.
Dunno. WFM, jaunty, karmic.
Try again? Maybe you weren't done installing it.

Oh, also, I think there's a build script floating around somewhere someone on the forums. I think it does pretty much the same things.

I've tried installing 0.9.12 on Jaunty with the build script in the download page (which is outdated btw, I've done some modifications otherwise it would just install 0.9.9 as latest stable).

So the NPOTT is disabled. I am also having nVidia (latest driver). Game just stuck at (In game..) without starting the actual game.

Here is the content of debug0.txt

     0: Console write: Hedgewars 0.9.12 engine
     0: Prefix: "./"
     0: 0: /usr/local/bin/hwengine
     0: 1: /home/saleh/.hedgewars
     0: 2: 800
     0: 3: 600
     0: 4: 32
     0: 5: 36752
     0: 6: 0
     0: 7: 1
     0: 8: 0
     0: 9: en.txt
     0: 10: 128
     0: 11: 8
     0: 12: /usr/local/share/hedgewars/Data
     0: 13: 0
     0: 14: 0
     0: 15: QW5pbWE=
     0: 16: 1
     0: 17: 0
     0: Console write: Init SDL... 
     0: Console write: ok
     0: Console write: Init SDL_ttf... 
     0: Console write: ok
     0: ParseCommand "fullscr 0"
     0: Prepare to change video parameters...
     0: Couldn't find matching GLX visual
     0: Console write: Couldn't find matching GLX visual
halt at 0 ticks

Huh. Interesting.
Try a different resolution.
Also, what colour mode are you in? 16, 24 or 32?

Tried a different resolution, still no luck.
Color depth is 24.

I have no idea what changed, but suddenly I can play now. The only update of any note that's been installed is a libc6 update. Crazy...

Anyways, if I could possibly get an answer to another question. My linux version doesn't seem to have the ability for me to be a LAN server, is there a way to enable that?

AFAIK, he didn't build that piece due to some issue he had in compilation.
I believe was the same problem I had. The server depends on haskell packages that do not exist in debian/ubuntu package management.

If you want, you can try to build it yourself. I think the package you will need is dataenc and can be provided by the cabal haskell package builder.

Feel free to drop by IRC - I can try to help and unC0Rr definitely can.

Once I get a little bit more free time I might do that, still not sure what the deal is on my fpc problem but I can probably figure it out once I learn a little bit more about cmake.