PC PowerPlay 22/PCPP #22.iso/games/Win95/bt/README.TXT

Text File | 1997-12-03 | 13.7 KB | 309 lines

Quick play notes on the bfris 11/30/97 engine *TEST* release:

"Quick" turned out to be rather long, but please read this all.  It will
hopefully answer most of your questions.

This is a TEST.  It is not a complete product.  If you're not interested in
seeing a program crash and destroy itself in new and interesting ways, please
don't run this.  If you are interested in getting a sneak peek at BFRIS before
the weak-stomached and don't mind the occasional segmentation fault, by all
means give it a shot.

In exchange for this, we ask only that you send comments.  If you couldn't make
it run or if it only blinked random letters at you, please let us know.  If
it runs great and looks beautiful but you get one frame every eight seconds,
please let us know.  If it works great, runs well, and you and your friends
are as if in a drug-induced haze while playing because of how cool it was,
we'd like to hear that too.  Or anything in between.  Please drop an email to
Joe Waters ([e-mail]).  If you're having problems getting it working,
please be as specific as possible: what CPU, how much memory, what operating
system (and revision!), what sound card, graphics card, what graphics driver
revision, how are you connecting to the network are all things that can help.
If you're playing the linux version (which has some debug information) the tail
end of that would be helpful as well.

WHAT WE'VE TESTED WITH:

We've tested primarily with cards based on the 3dfx Voodoo and 3dlabs Permedia2
chipsets.  Cards that we've gotten to work (to various degrees) include
Orchid Righteous 3D, Diamond Monster 3D, Canopus Pure3D, Quantum 3D Obsidian
50-4440, Creative Labs' GraphicsBlaster 3D Exxtreme with the Permedia 2, and
Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro with Permedia 2 chipset.  We've run successfully under
Windows 95 OSR2, Windows NT 4.0, Linux 2.0.30, and Linux 2.1.54.

ALL VERSIONS:
    You can start without sound by adding the -nosound argument on the
    command line.  This is recommended if you don't have a sound card
    installed; results of trying to run with sound (when you have no card/
    driver) are unpredictable.

3DFX/Linux users:
    The binary is just called 'bfris'.  change into the directory where
    you uncompressed the .tar.gz file and type 'bfris' or 'bfris -nosound'
    if you don't have a sound driver installed.

    You must have glide-2.4 installed.  It's available from the 3dfx
    web pages.  You also must be running some version of X11R6, and using
    Mesa-2.5.  The linux distribution includes libMesaGL.so.2.5, or you
    can download and recompile the library from
    http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~brianp/Mesa.html.  If you notice strange
    artifacts in some objects (missing faces etc) and you're using your
    own Mesa library, you may want to try to compile the linux-glide
    target instead of the linux-386-glide target.

>    Make sure that the MESA_GLX_FX environment variable is set to
>    "fullscreen".  Under tcsh, say
>
># setenv MESA_GLX_FX fullscreen
>
>    under bash, say
>
>bash$ export MESA_GLX_FX=fullscreen

    To get joystick control (highly recommended for this test as there is
    a bug with sticky keys in the X11 version) you need to either compile
    the joystick driver (and sound driver!) into the kernel with 2.1.x
    kernels or compile the joystick module (available from most linux
    archive sites) and install that.  You must compile sound code into
    your kernel to get sound in bfris.  If the game crashes in the middle,
    it may leave the sound process (called lnx_sdrv) running.  You'll need
    to kill this (possibly even two kill it twice) with "killall lnx_sdrv"
    which should work on most recent linux installations.  Otherwise use
    ps and kill it by process number.  Unfortunately, because the 3dfx
    glide library writes directly to the voodoo card, you must be running
    as root to run bfris.  Work is under way to write a suid wrapper to
    allow bfris to run without root permissions once the 3dfx card ports
    are opened.

Win95/WinNT users:
    There are two versions of the binary: bfris-o.exe has a few
    [O]ptimizations which should work with the 3dfx chipset but may cause
    graphic weirdness on other chipsets if they don't have a full
    implementation.  bfris-u.exe is an [U]noptimized version which should
    behave better with incomplete OpenGL implementations.

    Windows 95/NT version requires DirectX 3.0a or greater to be installed
    to get sound and joystick control.

    You should start the game from a DOS window in the directory where you
    uncompressed the zip file.

>    If you are *not* running with a 3dfx chipset card, you *must* remove
>    or rename the opengl32.dll and glu32.dll files in the bfris install
>    directory to something else, and you must of course have your opengl
>    drivers installed in your windows system directory.  Alternatively,
>    you could install your card's opengl32.dll and glu32.dll drivers in
>    the bfris directory in place of the existing ones (which are 3dfx-
>    specific).  If you get a message that glide2x.dll is required, you
>    are using the 3dfx-specific opengl32.dll and glu32.dll files.

3DFX/win95/winNT users:
1)    You *must have* the latest 3dfx glide runtime drivers for your card
    or you may get unpredictable results (black screen with text but
    no game, etc).  We've run with the 3dfx glide 2.43 reference drivers
    with no problems, so you can always fall back on those (available from
    http://www.3dfx.com/download/sdk/index.html).

2)    There is an opengl32.dll and glu32.dll file included in this
    distribution.  These were compiled from Mesa-2.5 using MSVC++ 5.0.
    Source code for Mesa 2.5 is available from the Mesa web pages
    should you wish to recompile.  DO NOT put these libraries in your
    \windows\system directory unless you really know what you're doing;
    simply leave them in the BFRIS directory and make sure you run the
    game from there.

3)    3dfx has released an Alpha 3dfxGL driver (this is different from the
    new beta OpenGL driver from SGI, which we have not yet tested).
    Be forewarned: we didn't put this in the distribution because it's
    linked against the Microsoft Visual C++ debug library MSVCRTD.DLL,
    which not everybody has on their computer.  Please don't write us and
    say that you can't get the program to run because it wants this DLL;
    use the Mesa library instead.

4)    DON'T TRY TO RUN THIS WITH THE QUAKE MiniGL DRIVER.  The driver is
    optimized and tuned specifically for Quake, and lacks critical
    functions required to make BFRIS run.  It won't work.  It shouldn't
    destroy anything but it certainly won't be pretty.

5)    If you get stuck looking at a black screen, try (left) <CTRL>-F9 which
    should turn the voodoo card off.

6)    We haven't tried BFRIS with a Voodoo Rush card; we'd be interested to
    know how it goes.

Permedia 2 chipset users:

    We have done limited testing with this card and verified that it does
    work, though it does not look totally correct.  The engagement sphere
    may not be textured (we're working on the source of this problem)
    and the lighting model is a bit darker than OpenGL drivers for other
    cards.  If you have a card with 4mb, you should switch your windows
    display mode to 640x480x16bit color before running BFRIS, or you may
    get strange results which require a reboot.


PowerVR PCX2, nVidia Riva128, and Rendition Verite users:

    We have not done any testing with these chipsets, but understand that
they either do (or will shortly) have at least OpenGL MCD drivers available.
If you can get one of these to work, please let us know; if not, we're still
interested in what kinds of errors you get.  We know that the Riva128 works
except that missiles and plasma bursts don't show up; we're working on a
possible fix for this one.

If you see a framerate of one frame every 20 seconds or so, you are not
running with 3-D acceleration.


HOW TO PLAY:

THE GOAL:

    Stuff is shooting at you.  Shoot back at it.  Take down its shields.
Blow it up.  Smile a lot.

THE BAD GUYS:

    You can not kill asteroids.  They are much larger than you.  They laugh
and mock your feeble attempts to destroy them with your puny weapons.

    Cannon turrets are small, non-moving practice targets.  When the game
starts you will be in practice mode; you can shoot cannons.  They have lots of
shields.  If you shoot them enough, they'll blow up.  Don't stay in one place
too long or they'll hose you.  Only turn on the TOGGLE-TURRETS console
command if you are very brave.

    Other ships have less shields than cannons and can be destroyed (in
netplay only; the single ship in practice mode is invulnerable).  There is only
one ship (kind of a poor performer at that) available in the test demo.

    To join a network game, you should be connected to the Internet through
TCP/IP either direct or by modem.  We've tested multi-player battles on 28.8
modems with no problems; depending on lag, your mileage may vary.


Keyboard codes:

`        brings up console
<TAB>        show scores
arrow keys    pitch/roll
1-5         along top of keyboard - view controls
6 - 10      throttle settings (10 highest 6 lowest) (if keyboard mode on)
'k' go into keyboard mode
'j' activate joystick mode / change number of active joystick axes (linux only)
'h' help for more buttons
't' target next enemy
'r' target closest enemy
'e' target enemy in reticle

<ESC> (win95/NT)  / CTRL-ESC (linux) quit
space/joybutton 2  fire missile
left shift (linux) / 'z' (win95/NT) /joybutton 1 fire plasma shells

when the game first starts, you may need to swirl your joystick to it's
extremes (including throttle) to calibrate it.  Joystick mode currently
requires some sort of throttle axis; this will be fixed for the main demo
release.

console options:

CONNECT sitename    open net connection to "sitename"
PORT nnnn           change connection port to nnnn (default 42000)
NAME username       change name to username
TEAM number         change to team number (0-5)
DISCONNECT          disconnect from game
SAY textstring      broadcast string to all other players
TURRET-TOGGLE       toggle cannons from guns to missiles (may crash 3dfx
            cards running Mesa)

Note that you should set your name and team number _before_ you attempt to
join a network game.

Remember to hit '`' after you're connected to remove the console window so that
game keys work.


Joe's general procedure for connecting to a netgame:

1) swirl joystick, adjust trim if necessary
2) hit '`' to bring up console
3) NAME FALC
4) TEAM 4
5) CONNECT AEGISTECH.COM
6) hit '`' to remove console
7) hit 'r' to target the nearest bad guy
8) shoot him mercilessly until he explodes
9) smile
10) bring down the console, use the SAY command to taunt your enemies



NOTES ON THE SERVER:

The server binary is called bfrisd (linux) or bfrisd.exe (win95/NT).  The
distributed server only allows three simultaneous players for testing purposes.
The win32 version of the server is not very robust; it can not tell if a player
is accidentally disconnected from the game, and will continue to try to contact
that player forever.  The linux version is much more robust.  Included is a shell script 'bfrisdd' which can be executed (you may have to modify the first line to point to the location of your tcsh binary) and which will keep the server running even if you log out.  So you can leave the server running on a machine
with a good connection by tying something like

> nohup bfrisdd &
> logout

If you want to hang a server off of a machine (they use very little load as
they sleep almost all of their lives and don't talk much) please drop us some
email and we'll put a pointer to it on our web pages.  Please also let us know
if it's a linux or win95 server.

Linux clients should have no trouble connecting to win95 servers (and vice
versa) but win95 servers (currently) aren't very stable.

You can play locally (again up to 3 players) on an ethernet.  If you are
running a local game, you might want to lower server latency with the -latency
command; this will ask all connecting clients to lower the delays between their
update packets.  The server default (for low-bandwidth high-latency modem
connections) is 100 which means one update every second; this is a pretty good
balance with predictive dynamics that still allows for a number of players
without the game losing too many packets.  The lowest you'll probably want to
go is 25, which is good for a local area 10mbit ethernet connection.  Let us
know if you find better values, how many players you can connect reliably, and
what type of connections they're on.

bfrisd has a couple of other command-line arguments:

    -port nnnnn   specifies a port number.  default is 42000.  You
should be able to leave this alone in most cases.

    -silent          suppress almost all messages


Contact [e-mail] with any questions, and please check out our
web pages at http://www.aegistech.com for continuing updates.


CREDITS:

MESA LIBRARY for 3dfx
    Brian Paul (Mesa) and David Bucciarelli (3dfx port)

SOUND CODE for Linux version
    Modified from Abuse engine work done by Jonathan Clark at Crack.Com
    Crack rules, they are good folk, buy Golgotha when it comes out.

THE GAME
    The Aegis Simulation Technologies Crew
    Fred Chavez, Rafael Rubio, and Joe Waters


Other groups and individuals who kick ass:

    Linus Torvalds, HLU, many many MANY others who worked to make linux
    a viable, cost effective, and incredibly elegant solution to the
    cheap unix workstation problem.  Developing under linux probably
    halved the amount of time required to make the thing work.

    Brain Brunning, Gary Tarolli, Brain Hook, Gary McTaggart and many
    others who are (or were) at 3Dfx for _finally_ bringing 3-D graphic
    acceleration to the masses and then making the bold decision to
    RELEASE AN SDK FOR FREE.