Hardcore Gamer Resource Kit/Hardcore Gamer Resource Kit - Disc 3.iso/games/cybrdome.zip/README.TXT

Text File | 1997-01-13 | 24KB | 488 lines

http://www.atgp.com

To:    Whom it may concern (probably you!)
From:    Stephen Clarke-Willson
Date:    Monday, January 06, 1997
Re:    CyberDome Notes

Overview of the game:

* 8 training levels
* 64 game levels
* 7 kinds of enemy ships - NOTE:  each one of the
approximately 450 enemy ships is individually tuned
* 5 weapons
* Heat seeking missile - tracks into enemy ship if within a
certain, large distance
* Laser - more powerful than missile but requires direct hit
 Laser and missile quantity is unlimited (displays as 999)
* Flash bomb - more powerful than missile but requires near-
direct hit
* MIRV - Multiple Independent Retargetable Vehicles - splits
into four missiles when close to an object or after a short
time
* Smart Bomb - launches out  and then destroys everything on
screen
* 5 powerups
* All power-ups are wire-frame - but note some hardware
cannot display wire-frame so power-ups might appear solid.
* Partial Shield (green wire-frame sphere) -increase by 25%
 Total shield is limited to 999%
* Full Shield (yellow wire-frame sphere) - increase to 100%
or 200%
 If player ship is at 99% or less, player ship is set to
100%;
 If player ship is at 100% - 199%, player ship is set to
200%.
* Cloaking (blue wire-frame sphere)- enemy ships are not
aware of location of player ship
 Enemy ships also do not avoid player ship so it is easier
to accidentally run into enemy ships.  Lasts 20 seconds.
* Invulnerable (magenta wire-frame sphere) - enemy ships can
not damage player ship
Invulnerable overrides cloaking if both are picked up.
Lasts 20 seconds.
* Extra ship (red wire-frame cube).


Controls:
* Keyboard controls:
* Numeric keypad:
* 1,4,7 - turn left
* 3,6,9 - turn right
* '*' - cycle through weapons
* '/' - autotarget next enemy
* '+', '-' - speed up, slow down
* INS - shoot
* Regular keyboard:
* '/', 't' - autotarget next enemy
* '=', '+' - speed up
* '-', '_' - slow down
* '*' - cycle through weapons
* CTRL, SHIFT, Space - shoot
    CTRL and SHIFT ignore the "typematic" rate imposed by
the keyboard BIOS, and therefore are more responsive for
shooting.
* Alt-F4, of course, exits.
* Joystick controls:
* Button 1 - shoot
* Button 2 - autotarget next enemy
* Button 3 (if present) - cycle forward through weapons
* Button 4 (if present) - cycle backward through weapons
    For buttons 3 and 4, and '*' key, weapons with zero
ammo are skipped.
* Direction pad -
* forward, back - tilt down, up
* right, left - turn right, left
Configuration Editor:
* CyberDome Configuration Settings (greatly enlarged for
version 1.1):
* Enable hardware acceleration - off by default, because of
the wide variety of driver bugs and implementations.
* Maximized display - off by default; the default size is a
400x300 window and works well on all P90 and above
computers. You can turn this option on or you can hit the
"Maximize" button (the little square one at the upper right)
to go "full screen" at the current resolution of the
display, but the game will still be running in a window..
On some display adapters there might not be enough display
memory to support 3D at that resolution.  If you have a 4
meg 3D board, then you can run at 800x600x16!  For a 2 meg
3D board, 640x480x16 is the maximum recommended.  A P200
probably looks okay in software only at 800x600x16 and
should work on a 2 meg video board.
* "Full Screen" display - this is Microsoft-talk for running
in a mode that takes over the display of your computer and
generally eliminates Windows from interfering with the game.
In this mode, the graphics are displayed at 640x480x16 and
there is no Windows interface present.  You can press Alt-F4
anytime to exit, or use Alt-Tab to switch away to other
applications.  When you return to the game, there will be a
slight (one to two second) pause while the drawing surfaces
are reacquired.  NOTE:  this is the only way to get 3dfx
VooDoo-based boards to accelerate the game, as they will not
work in a window.  If you have a 3dfx VooDoo-based board
(like the Righteous 3D) and you think the game is running
slowly, then make sure it is running "Full Screen."
* Simplified Dome - off by default; on some computers,
particularly P100 or less with some 3D accelerators, the
"geometry setup time" can exceed the benefit from the
"rendering time" increase from the 3D card.  Therefore,
choosing "Simplified Dome" cuts down on the number of
geometry transforms; on the other hand, some accelerators
will convert the wireframe dome into a solid dome, which
looks terrible, in which case you should forgo this option.
* Show Starfield - on by default; same as "Simplified Dome":
turning off the starfield can cut down on the number of the
geometry transforms; also, some hardware accelerators do not
support "point" display of objects, so you may have to use
this option if the starfield displays as a solid white
sphere when accelerated under hardware.
* Use textured starfield:  some hardware cannot display
"point" mode stars, but is very fast at painting textures
(most notably cards based on the 3dfx VooDoo chipset, such
as the Righteous 3D).  In this case, you can get an
interesting looking starfield by turning on this option; you
must also have "show starfield" turned on.
* Use polygonal explosions - off by default; the Matrox
Millennium does not support textures which are used for
explosions, and so polygonal explosions can be used instead.
Also, one some computers, there is a noticeable slowdown (a
fraction of a second) while the textured explosions are
created.  On these computers you might prefer to have
polygonal explosions.  Game play will be a bit snappier.
Also, some hardware accelerators abort (without any error
messages) after a certain number of explosions occur; this
can range anywhere from a couple of levels into the game to
over 30!  If this happens to you, after you stop yelling,
switch to polygonal explosions.
* Lighted Explosions:  Surprisingly, this seems to add very
little overhead and makes the area surrounding an explosion
light up when something blows up.  Turning this off will
speed up the game a little bit on really slow systems.
* Use Perspective Correction - off by default; there is no
performance penalty in the "software only" version, but many
3D accelerators slow down tremendously if this is turned on.
You give up a little visual fidelity but not much.
* Use Texture Filtering - off by default; bilinear filtering
of the textures drastically improves the explosion textures
and should be turned on if your hardware accelerator
supports it.  It is off by default because it will
drastically slow down the software-only renderer.
* Remove HUD:  this will remove all the game status data
from the display screen; if you are running in a window, the
status display is moved to the small area at the bottom of
the window where your current status can be read.  If you
remove this and are running "Full Screen", you'll have to
guess how well you are doing, as there is no status bar
present!  This is generally recommended only for very slow
boards and should only be used when in a windowed mode.
* Turn off background textures: These are the patterns or
title screens displayed behind the text (which is actually
3D, hence the shading), and you're not missing much by
turning these off.  These work fine in software-only
rendering but seem to break virtually every hardware
accelerator. In fact, since so much hardware is broken, as
soon as you choose to enable hardware acceleration (if
present), background textures are turned off as well.
* Enable joystick - on by default.
* Calibrate joystick every time - on by default.  If the
player's joystick is of good quality and relatively stable,
then the player can turn this off and skip the calibration
stage at startup.
    Note:  pressing 'Skip' on the first calibration screen
will also reuse the existing settings for the joystick.
    Note:  if the joystick doesn't have a sufficient range
of motion, the joystick calibration screens will reject the
calibration.  The player can choose "recalibrate" to try
again or 'skip' to ignore the joystick altogether.
Usually, the joystick will fail to have a sufficient range
of motion because the player simply failed to move the
joystick correctly, and recalibrating will fix the problem.
* Play Startup Movie - on by default; turn off to speed
startup time.
* Enable command line options - off by default, since the
command line options aren't generally documented.  Turn on
to allow special processing at startup.  This is the only
way to enter cheat codes.
* MIDI music - play music through sound card
* CD Audio - play music from CD, but be sure to place CD in
drive.  Behavior with multiple CD drives is not defined; the
player must place the CD in the correct drive.
* No music - sound effects only.
* Save button - save settings in registry.
* Cancel button - do not save any changes in registry.
Trouble Shooting
* Explosions look like white or black squares - the video
card does not support textures (Matrox Millennium); select
polygonal explosions.
* Explosions looked okay, but suddenly look strange later in
the game:  the 3D video driver is broken; select polygonal
explosions.
* Explosions look okay, but after some number of levels the
game either hangs or exits without any error messages - the
video driver is broken - select polygonal explosions.
* Explosions look okay, but after some number of levels the
game gives an error message something like this:  "The
cooperative level has already been set." - the video driver
is broken, select polygonal explosions.
* Background is one solid color - your driver doesn't
support either "point" display mode and therefore is
displaying the star field as one solid color; OR, your
driver doesn't support wire frame mode, and therefore is
displaying the "simplified dome" as one solid color.  Turn
off the star field and do NOT use the simplified dome in
this case.
* "Unable to create surface"; generally caused by trying to
run at too high a screen resolution - try 640x480x16 if you
have a 2meg card and 640x480x8 if you have a 1meg card.
Note:  the minimum size required for 3D acceleration is
2megs.
* Objects sometimes appear in the wrong color; this is a
Direct3D(tm) bug that shows up sometimes on 8-bit (256
color) displays.  Try to switch to 16-bit graphic mode if
there is sufficient video memory.
* Joystick disappeared - DirectX 3 installation seems to
disable joystick; reinstalling joystick driver from vendor
or Microsoft Windows 95(tm) disk will fix it.  This appears
primarily to people who are upgrading from DirectX2 to
DirectX3.
* Secret method for installing CyberDome without installing
DirectX:  You would want to do this when you've carefully
downloaded the latest drivers for your hardware and you
don't want the DirectX install program to change any of your
settings.  Run "Setup" directly from the CD-ROM from an MS-
DOS command window, with the "-nodx" option, like this:
"C:> setup -nodx"; use this when you like the way your
system is set up (DirectX 2 or DirectX 3) and you want to be
sure that the CyberDome install does not overwrite your
drivers.  CyberDome is designed to work best with DirectX3
but in limited testing has worked well with DirectX 2 as
well.
* Another way to avoid installing the DirectX subsystem:
Press SHIFT when clicking "Next" the first time (after
specifying the install directory); this will skip DirectX
installation.
* To save 8 megs of disk space, it is okay to delete the
opening movie, called "startup.avi".  It is not necessary to
turn off "Play Startup Movie"; if it's gone, it won't play
and no errors will be reported.
* DEBUG VERSION:  If you are running the "debug" version of
CyberDome there are special options available during game
play.  (Secret:  You can enable the debug version by using
the command line option "-edit".)  This is an unsupported
features - and if you give it a try I recommend you run in a
window and not 'FullScreen'.  CTRL and SHIFT are not
available for firing weapons.  If you click on an object
with the mouse, the game will freeze and then you can make
modifications to the object under the "Object" menu.  To
continue the game, choose "Object->Deselect".  You can alter
the display properties (wire-frame, flat, gouraud) or change
the texture.  Experiment.  Under the "Scenes" menu you can
change various hardware characteristics.  Experiment. You
can hit "i" (lower-case "eye") to give yourself weapons, and
"t" (lower-case tee) to give yourself ships. This is a
completely unsupported mode.

Game notes:
* "-demo" option on command line now goes directly to demo -
for trade show use (skips all interaction except option to
run configuration editor).
* When weapon count goes to zero, the new weapon chosen is
the next available LESS powerful weapon, instead of the
other way.  This way you don't accidentally use up your more
powerful weapons.
* Also, the smart bomb is never automatically chosen so you
don't use it accidentally.
* There are now some command line options to aid testing or
for cheating:
* "-level xx" or "-l xx" pretends level 1 is level xx, so
once you complete level 1, you will jump to level "xx + 1".
* "-ships xx" or "-n xx" gives you xx ships.
* "-p nnnnn" gives you nnnnn points.
* "-infiniteguns" will never decrement your ammo counter.
NOTE:  you still must pick up the appropriate weapon power-
up at least once before you can fire the weapon.
* "-infinitelives" will never decrement your ship counter.
* "-invulnerable" configures the game so you will never die.
Well, almost never.  There seem to be times when you can ram
into one of the star-shaped enemies and die - so be careful!
Of course, between "-infinitelives" and "-invulnerable" you
shouldn't have too much trouble.
* "-nodeath" is an earlier verision "-invulnerable" you
might want to try.  Or combine it with "-invulnerable" as
this might correct the one known case where you can die.
After all, if you're cheating, you might as well cheat all
the way.
* Note:  press escape to skip the intro movie if you want.

Changes for version 1.1:
* New "lighted explosions".
* Runs "Full Screen" (and therefore supports 3dfx VooDoo
based cards).
* It is possible to turn off the HUD.
* There is a textured star mode (mainly for the VooDoo).
* Background textures (for dialog boxes) can be turned off
(background textures in dialog boxes broke many cards).
* You can set the difficulty level from the configuration
editor or from the command line:  -easy (hits to your ship
are 1/2 strength); -normal; -hard (hits to your ship are
twice normal strength!).  -hard is very hard.  For that
matter, -normal is pretty hard.
* A bug that prevented 10-button joypads (like the new
Microsoft Sidewinder Gamepad) from initializing and
therefore crashed the game has been fixed.
* The simulation is more accurate on systems with a slow
frame rate.
* The game runs much faster on slower systems (P120 and
below) when lots of bullets are present.
* There was a ship you could only kill with a smart bomb on
level 34; this has been corrected.  (It was too close to the
dome and your missiles would disappear before hitting the
ship.)
* The first screen used to display in two sections - the
title and then the copyright.  This broke lots of hardware
so everything displays at once.
* There is a new (one second) delay between levels so the
computer voice doesn't step on her own speech.
* You can leave textures turned on but turn off separately
background textures for dialog boxes that break so much
hardware.  (In fact, just enabling the hardware will do
this, since virtually every driver crashes from this.  It
appears to be an interface problem in Direct3D.)
* The main dome is textured.
* You can turn on the status line and turn off the HUD
(recommended for windowed modes only) (command line: "-
nohud").
* There was a very rare timing bug where you might die and
see the "Game Over" screen and then return to the game, dead
in the water.  This has been corrected.
* The power-ups have all been changed to wire-frame for
simplicity; in addition, for those accelerated video boards
that can't display wire-frame, each power-up has a unique
color to help identify them if there are displayed as
solids.
* Note: there is additional score information hidden in the
registry:  visit
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\AtGP\CyberDome\Scores to see more
statistics on how well you've done.

3D Driver Tips:
* Many drivers arbitrarily die because of the hard work
required to show multiple textured explosions.  This is
severely annoying because it results in the game locking up.
To test your hardware to see if this happens without playing
the game just to see it crash, set your hardware up to
display textured explosions and then let the demo mode run
for a couple of hours.  If it runs for over two hours, then
you are unlikely to have a problem playing the entire game.
The game has been tested for over eight hours in the
software mode and with the 3dfx VooDoo Direct3D driver, so
if the game dies on your driver, it is a driver bug.  THE
FIX:  use polygonal explosions and complain to your hardware
manufacturer.  There are very few games that really stress
the hardware as much as CyberDome so encourage your hardware
vendor to use CyberDome to test their drivers.  The only
verified drivers that work reliably with textured
explosions, as of TODAY, Monday, January 06, 1997, is the
3dfx driver and the built-in software drivers.  Your mileage
may very as new drivers are created and released all the
time.  All other drivers we've tested (S3, Matrox, PowerVr,
ATI Rage I & II) run for hours with polygonal explosions.
* Several hardware drivers refuse to run the game more than
once without rebooting the computer.  This is very annoying
as you might imagine.  The symptom is that you will get a
"wait" cursor when you try to run the game again, but no
window will be created.  After a few seconds the "wait"
cursor disappears and that's that.  There is a program
called "Killhelp.exe" which will kill off the DirectDraw
helper program and let you run again, but I'm worried that
it is protected by license agreements with Microsoft so I
haven't included it.  Also, you could do some damage with it
if there is more than one DirectDraw program running.
Still, you might want to hunt around on the Web for it -
someone may have illegally posted it somewhere - or perhaps
Microsoft will purposefully make it available.  In the
meantime, I may get around to writing one that does the same
thing, so check the Above the Garage Productions web site
from time-to-time, at http://www.atgp.com .
* Speaking of software drivers, Direct3D comes with two: the
so-called "Ramp" or monochrome driver and so-called "RGB" or
full-color driver.  The monochrome driver isn't really just
one-colored but it does use internal tables to simplify
color calculations.  It is generally faster to use unless
you have hardware acceleration.  This is the default case
for non-accelerated computers.  If you happen to have an MMX
compatible computer, you might want to try RGB mode, which
runs faster than Ramp mode because of the use of special MMX
instructions that allows the computer to calculate the
entire color spectrum (Red, Green, Blue - hence "RGB") at
once.  You might also want to try it if you have a very fast
(P200 or higher) Pentium or Pentium Pro.  TO ENABLE:  use
the command-line prompt and enter the option "-rgb".
* There are a number of files called "something.reg" on the
CD-ROM.  These files will pre-load the registry with
settings that, at the time of this writing, given the
current hardware drivers, will enable a particular card to
work with CyberDome to the best of its ability.  All you
need to do is to double-click on one of these files and the
registry settings (which are what you are editing with the
Configuration Editor) will be modified for that card.
Generally speaking, the situation over time will tend to get
better, so if you like, after using one of these files, you
can use the Configuration Editor to selectively enable
additional features when you get a new driver in order to
test out the capabilities of the new driver.
* Special note on 3dfx VooDoo-based cards:  This is only
card, as of this writing, that can handle the textured star
field.  Amazingly, software drivers on fast machines in
reasonably sized windows (you have to test this yourself)
can often display the textured star field when an
accelerated card can not.  (Kind of a bummer, eh?)  The 3dfx
card looks really great with the following settings:
textures on, perspective correct textures on, filtered
textures on, fullscreen (the only way it will work), hud on,
show starfield on, use textured starfield on, use high-color
textures on, lighted explosions on, ..., and I think that's
everything.  You might also try those settings on a P200 in
a 400x300 or 640x480 window.
* An annoying trait of many drivers is an inability to
gracefully switch from an 8-bit (256 color) desktop mode to
16-bit mode full-screen without messing up.  If you think
this might be affecting you, try setting your desktop color
depth to the same color depth you want to run the game.
Game Tips:
* Overall, this is a difficult game.  You can make it much
easier with the "-easy" command line option or "Easy" choice
in the Configuration Editor.  If you're good - really good -
you can finish the entire game (all 64 levels) in a little
over an hour at the normal settings.  Nobody has completed
the game (yet) on hard.
* Use the first few levels to master the auto-targeting.
You'll know you're good at it because you'll make it up to
around level 20.  Then things get harder again.  At level 20
you'll have the opportunity to start collecting lots of life
power-ups.  You can collect about four extra lives in level
20.  What you should do is to collect three of them and then
allow yourself to be killed.  This will let you restart the
level and collect another three lives.  Do this any number
of times until you feel you have enough lives to finish the
game.  There are other levels with ship power-ups (try to
figure out the scenes.scw file if you want to find them -
it's a text file), but this is the easiest place to collect
them.  NOTE:  you'll have to give up all your hard-earned
health to do this - it's worth it.
* NOTE:  editing the scenes.scw file may make it unusable!
It will certainly eliminate any possibility of customer
service from MMI!
* Save your smart-bombs for times when you just can't hack a
level.
* In some of the levels where the ships are flying very
fast, the best way to attack them is to figure out where
they are flying, and then fly the opposite direction, toward
the ship.  So if a ship is flying in a circle around the
dome, get a feel for the pattern, and then fly the opposite
direction.  This gives you the most time to target the ship
and let loose some heat seeking missiles, MIRVs, or bombs.
(Of course, try to avoid a head-on collision.)
* In some levels, some of the ships start out close to you,
and auto-targeting them (as in the 3rd training level) will
cause a lot of damage.  The easiest way to get the situation
under control (use this in the 8th training level too) is to
hit the auto-target key or button several times in a row -
this will point you toward a ship that is far enough away
from you that you'll have some time to think about what
you're doing and usually fly you away from the nearby ships.
* Good luck!

For more information, visit the Above the Garage Productions
World Wide Web page at http://www.atgp.com.



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