FREEDROID(6)

NAME
freedroidRPG - a graphical single player role playing game featuring Tux the Linux mascot

0. INDEX

1. Introduction

2. Install & Play

3. Basic controls

4. Known issues

5. Screen resolution

6. FAQ
    - Miscellaneous
     - Graphics
     - Sound
     - Level Editor & Developer

7. Contact us

8. Licence

1. Introduction
This game tells the story of a world destroyed by a conflict between the droids and their human masters. Play as Tux in a quest to save the world from the murderous rebel droids who know no mercy. You get to choose which path you wish to follow, and freedom of choice is everywhere in the game. FreedroidRPG features a complete real time combat system with melee and ranged weapons, fairly similar to the proprietary game Diablo. There also is an innovative system of magic, with features such as forced casting and over 20 spells. You can use over 50 different kinds of items and fight countless enemies on your way to your destiny. We have an advanced dialogue system, which aims at being at least on par with Fallout's. The dialogues in the game represent a large part of the gameplay. Finally, if guns are too inaccurate and blades too messy, you can always take over your enemies and have them fight on your side.

2. Install & Play
For general help with installation, please refer to the INSTALL file located in the same folder as this file. Specific instructions for Ubuntu: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6127097#post6127097 To run the game you normally just have to launch the executable. For advanced options execute "freedroidRPG --help" (in a terminal) to get a list of commandline options.

3. Controls

  Movement

The game is controlled using the mouse. Left click onto the locations you want to move to. Hold the button down to keep moving in that direction. Holding down CTRL key will make you run.

  Attack
Left clicking an enemy will cause Tux to come close to the droid and to start attacking it with the current weapon. If the current weapon is a gun then Tux will stand still and shoot the droid.

  Special functions
Use the right click to activate the currently selected skill/program. Default keys (most keys can be reassigned with the ingame key chart - F1)

Escape .... Show main menu

F1 ........... Show keychart

F2 ........... Toggle fullscreen (Linux only)

F3 ........... Quicksave

F4 ........... Quickload

F5-F12 .... Quick-select program 1 through 8

I .............. Inventory panel

C ............. Character panel

S ............. Skills/Program panel

Space ...... Close all open panels

Q ............ Quest log

0-9 .......... Use quick-inventory items 0-9

P ............. Pause

Hold A ..... Attack while staying at the same position

Hold Shift Keep current target selected when moving

Tab .......... Toggle automap

R .............. Reload weapon

Hold Ctrl .. Run

U ............. Toggle always run

Hold X ..... Show labels for items on the ground

Z ............. Toggle show labels for items on the ground

T ............. Toggle walls becoming transparent when Tux approaches (OpenGL only)

4. Known Issues

  General
* Most melee and ranged weapons only have placeholder laserswords/rifles for their Tux holding and attack animations. If you are skilled with 3D modelling, please help us out to fix this. * Nvidia Geforce 8&9 cards: Transparency in some parts of the game works incorrectly. E.g. instead of making the walls semi transparent when Tux comes close (in "key T" mode), they vanish completely.

  Windows
* Using the tool IZarc to unpack the downloaded zip breaks the game. IZarc apparently can not handle filenames without extensions. Please use other options, e.g. 7zip, winzip, winrar etc, to correctly unpack the game. * The game will use the system language by default, you cannot select another language in-game.

  Linux
* Pulseaudio: Using SDL-pulseaudio you are currently likely to not get sound. This has nothing to do with FDRPG but with Pulseaudio and it's plugins still in general being unmature. We recomend using eg SDL-esd or SDL-alsa until these problems has been fixed upstream. If you manage to get a working config, do let us know so we can update this entry with versionnumbers etc. * AMD/ATI R300 graphics cards: Mesa 6.5.2 does not support user clipping planes which breaks the text in freedroidRPG. Upgrading to Mesa 7 fixes this. * When playing in SDL windowed mode, teleporting has the side effect of changing the brightness of the whole screen instead of just the game window, if the option (Options -> Performance Tweaks ->) Skip fadings is set to "NO". * Ubuntu: Changing language in game will not work by default since Ubuntu does not ship with standard ISO locales, only UTF-8 versions.You will have to manually add them to make language selection work.
     Procedure
        1) In commandline write
                sudo nano /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local
        2) Add the locales you are interested in, 1 entry on each line, e.g.
                de_DE ISO-8859-15
                fr_FR ISO-8859-15
                sv_SE ISO-8859-15
                ru_RU.cp1251 cp1251
           and then exit with ctrl+x and yes to saving the changes.
        3) Run
                sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
        4) You should now be able to chose the corresponding languages in the in game menu.

5. Screen resolution
There are a few hidden high resolution settings only accessible from commandline. They are badly tested and thus generally considered to be buggy and are unsupported. They however can still be quite useful for many, especially for widescreen LCDs in fullscreen mode. To get an up-to-date list of available resolutions use "freedroidRPG -r99". Some known issues for the unsupported resolutions:
    - Portrait image in dialogs overflows its borders
    - Off center light radius
    - Incorrect text scrolling when talking to NPCs at times

6. FAQ

  Miscellaneous FAQ:
Q: Do I have to have Linux to try out Freedroid/FreedroidRPG? A: While using Linux is greatly recommended for the sanity of the system administrator, FreedroidClassic and FreedroidRPG both have MS-Windows executables available. Note that since the FreedroidRPG development team doesn't use MS-Windows, it gets much less testing. Help with testing and feedback from Windows users thus is greatly appreciated. Q: How can I subscribe/unsubscribe to the mailing list? A: Freedroid has two mailing list. One is for discussing stuff related to Freedroid, the other one is a list with auto-generated changelogs from our developer server and therefore usually only interesting for developers themselves. In any case, you can subscribe, unsubscribe or change your membership options from the following web page: http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=54521

  Graphics FAQ:
Q: The game is *extremely* slow on my system running Windows and using OpenGL output. A: It might be that you're using the OpenGL drivers that came with your operating system from Microsoft. These drivers don't use hardware acceleration and are therefore extremely slow. You'll have to download and install a real OpenGL capable driver for you graphics card. Usually these can be downloaded from the home page of the graphics chip manufacturer, typically Nvidia, AMD/ATI, etc. Note, that if you do absolutely cannot get OpenGL working reliably on your system, you can still run the game in pure SDL output mode. For this, you must either use a 'MS-DOS command line prompt' and type freedroidRPG -n inside this command line, or you can also make a link to freedroidRPG.exe and then edit the link properties and add the -n after freedroidRPG.exe in the link properties dialog box. Q: The game is *extremely* slow on my Linux machine with OpenGL enabled. A: The reason for this might be that you're not using hardware accelerated OpenGL. Software OpenGL should be avoided. If you don't have hardware-accelerated OpenGL on your system (because e.g. your graphics card manufacturer doesn't make suitable Linux drivers), you might be much better off when disabling OpenGL support altogether. For this, you can use command line switch -n, i.e type freedroidRPG -n to start the game with OpenGL output disabled. Graphics will revert to pure SDL mode.

  Sound FAQ:
Q: My sound isn't working with FreedroidRPG. I don't hear anything. A: 1.) Make sure your sound is working with other applications. If you don't hear anything when trying to play simple mp3 files or ogg files, then the sound system on your machine is not properly set up and it's not a freedroid related problem. In that case, you must install your sound card properly first. 2.) See if you have the SDL_mixer libraries installed. You might want to use "locate SDL_mixer" and see if you get a lot of results. If not, then the missing SDL_mixer library is the problem. Also check if you have libogg and libvorbis installed.

3.) If you're compiling from source, make sure the ./configure script has properly detected the SDL_mixer library. Just look at the ./configure output. There should be a line like: checking for Mix_ChannelFinished in -lSDL_mixer... yes If you get instead something like checking for Mix_ChannelFinished in -lSDL_mixer... no then the ./configure script didn't detect your SDL_mixer installation. You might want to make sure you've got SDL_mixer and SDL_mixer_devel packages installed or install SDL_mixer from source. You can download everything from here: http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_mixer/ If you compiled from source, you'll have to recompile now, because the previous compile didn't include the sound module of FreedroidRPG. If the SDL_mixer stuff is installed properly, it should work after the recompile. Q: My sound is lagging behind. Every sound seems to be somewhat out of sync. A: There might be a sound daemon running on your system. Many window managers like e.g. KDE start a sound daemon by default upon startup. To get rid of the most common sound daemons, you can try (best as root) killall -9 artsd killall -9 esd killall -9 yiff After that, you might want to try freedroid again. The sound lag should not be present anymore.

  Level Editor & Developer FAQ:
Q: Is there a Level editor? A: Yes, we have a level editor integrated into FreedroidRPG. It can be accessed from the main menu. It has tooltips on every button to help you find your way. Play around with it a bit by yourself and don't hesitate to ask for assistance on IRC or the mailing list. Q: How can I get the latest development version of the game? A: This is very simple when using Linux. You can find the details here: https://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=54521 If you are using Windows we recomend using a tool like eg http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ If you still run into problems, best again discuss it with the people on the freedroid-discussion mailing list. Q: I want to help out with FreedroidRPG development. What should I do first? A: Best thing is to first subscribe to the freedroid-discussion mailing list. Then the next thing to do is to get the latest development version of the game from SVN, then to either make a small patch right away or to discuss anything bigger you have in mind with the people on the discussion mailing list, so it can be assured that all the developers are pulling in the same direction and know what's going on and who is working on what. If you are new to the Sourceforge, you should also take at least a brief look at our Sourceforge project pages. You can find the main page here http://sourceforge.net/projects/freedroid and other relevant pages should be reachable from there. Q: How can I add a character to FreedroidRPG? A: This involves several steps: 1. A new map label must be created, so that the game knows where to place the new character inside the game. 2. A dialog section should be written, so that there can be some interaction (other than combat) with this character. 3. The dialog section should get a number associated with it, which involves some very minor modification of the program code. 4. An entry in the character list has to be added, so that the new character will be added in any new games from then on. (Old saved games will remain unaffected.) You can specify what the character should look like, i.e. what model should be used for your character and stuff like that. Hint: Best send word to the developers. We'll be happy to help or also to include the new character in the next version of the game, if it comes with a good dialog.

7. Contact
Website ................ http://freedroid.sourceforge.net/ IRC channel ................ #freedroid on irc.freenode.net Mailing list ................ freedroid-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net Sourceforge project page ... http://sourceforge.net/projects/freedroid/

8. Licence
The game itself is licensed under GPL. Some other tools use a more permissive license, please refer to the FILES file located in the same folder as this file.