The Castle — additional notes

Contents:

Detailed requirements

In short: good graphics card, with good OpenGL drivers installed. In case of doubt, be sure to install newest drivers from your graphics card manufacturer.

Also you should have enough free memory available when running the game. As of version 0.6.3, game can take up to 280 MB on GeForce with Linux drivers from nvidia.com. But this may depend on various factors, including your OpenGL implementation. If the game seems to drain your system of all the memory (which will most likely be observed as sudden slowdown in the middle of "Loading creatures" sequence, as this is the main memory-eater) you can

• Try closing all other programs before running the game (although a decent OS should send them to swap anyway...)
• Lower the setting "Creature animation smoothness" in "Video options".

Library requirements:

• OpenGL
• Libpng, Zlib (under Windows appropriate DLL files are already included in program's archive, so you don't have to do anything)
• OpenAL and OggVorbis (VorbisFile and dependencies) libraries are strongly suggested if you want to hear sound (under Windows appropriate DLL files are already included in program's archive, so you don't have to do anything)
• Mac OS X users should look at the list of dependencies on Mac OS X (link to vrmlengine.sf.net)

Window size

The game prefers to be run in resolution 800x600.

But there is a command-line option --screen-size that you can use to change desired screen size. You can specify any screen sizes (not necessarily matching some usual fullscreen sizes, so even something crazy like --screen-size 600x700 works). But beware that, while the game works and is perfectly playable in any resolution, some 2D graphics and menus really look best only in default 800x600 resolution.

If your current screen resolution is 800x600 (or whatever you requested by --screen-size), the game will happily run in fullscreen. Otherwise the game will try to resize your screen first (on exit, the screen size will be restored to previous size). If this resizing will fail (for whatever reason, e.g. you have poor graphics driver), it will run in windowed mode.

You can pass command-line option --no-screen-change (short form: -n) to disable the automatic screen resizing. Then the game will run in fullscreen mode only if your current screen size is appropriate, otherwise it will run in windowed mode. You can also set this from the main menu: "Video options -> Allow screen settings change on startup".

Sound notes

OpenAL is used to play sounds. See my instructions about installing OpenAL and command-line options common for my programs using OpenAL.

For best effect, be sure to try all available devices in "Sound options" — the default device doesn't always sound the best. This is true for both Unixes and Windows. E.g. a standard sound card (without real 3d surround support) on Windows may sound better with "Generic Software" device.

If the game performance suffers when the sound is on, or sound quality suffers, or there is sound latency, then you should probably stop any other programs that play some music.

Other command-line options

• --debug-log

  This will output a lot of info on stdout. When sending bug reports, it may be useful to attach generated log to your report — it will show some things about your OpenGL, OpenAL, and what happened during the game.

• See some general notes about command-line options understood by all my programs. In particular, castle --help will show full list of all available command-line options.

• --no-shadows

  This disallows rendering of shadows in the game. Just like turning off "Video options -> Shadows" option, this will speed up rendering, since shadows will not be rendered. Moreover this command-line option will cause whole game to require less resources (we don't require stencil buffer from the OpenGL context) and loading creatures will be (very slightly) faster.

  It's adviced to use this option only if stencil buffer of your graphic card requires too much resources. Then setting "Video options -> Shadows" option will not help, but this command-line option will help. In other cases, just turning off menu option "Video options -> Shadows" is a sufficient way to speed up rendering.

Details about items in the game

You can pick items (just walk on them), browse your items (keys: i, [, ]), drop (key: r), equip and use (key: enter). When you have no weapon equipped, then new picked weapon will be automatically equipped. Unequipping happens automatically on drop.

Items are "stackable", i.e. when you own two or more items of the same kind, they are displayed like one item with quantity N. Picking and dropping handle this appropriately (when dropping you can drop only part of owned items).

You can use the "e" key ("Interact") when looking at item lying on the level, this tells you the name and quantity of visible object without picking it up. (of course, if object is too far, you will not be able to tell it exactly).

Dropping items may seem like a useless feature for now — there is no limit on the amount of items you can carry, right now. Dropping items will be more usefull in the the future, when the game will get more RPG gameplay elements. But even now dropping items may have a clever use: since collision detection is implemented correctly, you can drop items to block some closing doors. Beware that in the future some creatures may be able to pick up your items and some doors may simply squish your precious items...

Version numbers

For PGD competition (that ended on 2006-05), version numbers were 0.y.z, where "y" was a stage of competition. So e.g. "version 0.2.0" was what I submitted at the end of stage 2 of competition. "z" was a release number. The last version uploaded for PGD competition was 0.6.1.

Now, after PGD competition ended, I continue development using my normal versioning scheme (link to vrmlengine.sf.net).