Liquid War(6) | Games Manual | Liquid War(6) |
NAME¶
liquidwar - a unique multiplayer wargameSYNOPSIS¶
liquidwar [-vh]DESCRIPTION¶
Liquid War is a multiplayer wargame. Its rules are very simple but yet original.OPTIONS¶
- -v
- Displays the version number.
- -h
- Displays copyright and various information.
- ...
- There are many other command lines options, which are described further in this document.
WARNING¶
As Liquid War is a cross-platform program (it also runs on DOS and Windows), I could reasonably not provide groff UNIX-style documentation to Windows user. Therefore, Liquid War's documentation is available in many formats, including HTML, PostScript and PDF.Rules¶
The Liquid War concept¶
Liquid War is
a wargame. But it is different from common wargames.
When playing
Liquid War, one has to eat one's opponent. There can be from 2 to 6 players.
There are no weapons, the only thing you have to do is to move a cursor in a
2-D battlefield. This cursor is followed by your army, which is composed by a
great many little fighters. Fighters are represented by small colored squares.
All the fighters who have the same color belong to the same team. One very
often controls several thousands fighters at the same time. And when fighters
from different teams meet, they eat each other, it is as simple as that.
How do teams react?¶
Teams are
composed of little fighters. These fighters all act independently, so it can
happen that one single fighters does something different from what all the
other do.
The main goal
of these fighters is to reach the cursor you control. And to do that, they are
in a way quite clever, for they choose the shortest way to reach it. Check it
if you want, but it is true, they *really* choose *the* shortest way to reach
the cursor. That is the whole point with Liquid War.
But these
fighters are not perfect, so when they choose this shortest way, they do as if
they were alone on the battlefield. That's to say that if there is a fighter
blocking their way, they won't have the idea to choose another way, which is
free from fighters but would have been longer otherwise. So fighters can be
blocked.
Who eats whom?¶
When two
fighters from different team meet each other, they first try to avoid
fighting, and they dodge. But if there is no way for them to move, they get
angry and attack the guy which is blocking them. Sometimes, they attack each
other and both loose health. But it can happen that a fighter is attacked by
another one, which is himself not attacked at all.
Here is an
example of this behaviour: A blue fighter and a red fighter both want to move
to their right, for that would be the shortest way to reach their cursor if
there was nobody on the battlefield. But they are blocked by other fighters.
If, for instance, the red fighter is on the right and the blue fighter on the
left, it is the red fighter which will be eaten.
When a
fighter is attacked, he first looses health, that is to say that he gets
darker. When his health reaches 0, his color changes and he becomes a member
of the team by which he has been attacked. Therefore the number of fighters on
the battlefield always remains the same.
When fighters
of a same team get stuck together and block each other, then they regenerate,
that is to say that they get brighter.
However, I
think the best way for you to understand the way it works is to try the
game...
Basic strategy¶
When I play
Liquid War, I always try to surround my opponents, and it usually works.
By the way,
the computer has no strategy at all, he is a poor player, and if you get
beaten by him, it means you have to improve yourself a lot!
But still,
the computer doesn't do one thing which I've seen many beginners doing: he
never keeps his cursor motionless right in the middle of his own fighters, for
this is the best way to loose.
More strategy¶
Here are some
more tips, kindly submitted by Jan Samohyl.
- *
- Try to cut your opponent off walls and surround him completely with your troops; when trying to penetrate his forces inside a tunnel, keep your troops at the wall (and force them ocassionaly to attack off the wall). I think this is a biggest weakness of the computer AI, that it doesn't know this.
- *
- When luring your troops to outflank an enemy, always move your cursor through the enemy, not the other way around.
- *
- To penetrate very narrow tunnels, stand back for a while and let some enemy troops come from the tunnel to you. Then surround them, destroy, repeat.
- *
- I have observed that with more than 2 players (6), the game difficulty depends on the map in the following way: If the playing field is completely empty, without any holes (topologically equivalent to full circle), the game is the easiest, because you can just go through the middle to outflank your opponent. If there is a single large obstacle (ie. playfield is topologically equivalent to ring (the area between two nested circles)), the game is the most difficult, because you have to choose one direction for the attack, and cannot simply defend the other direction. For other maps, it seems to really depend on their similarity to one of these two extreme situations (and army size, of course, because it changes the relative size of obstacles). Also, if you would later add another cursor, this property would probably disappear (maybe then games with n+1 obstacles would be the hardest ones with n cursors).
- *
- If you want a particularly challenging computer game (at
least for some maps), use several players, max out attack, min out
defense, max out base health (opposite would be harder, but game then
changes to the large cloud of black troops, so you don't see anything) and
give winner an advantage.
The winner is...¶
The clever
guy who has got the greatest number of fighters in his team at the end of the
game. Or the one who exterminates all the other teams!
Authors¶
Thom-Thom¶
Liquid War
rules have been invented by Thomas Colcombet.
He was trying
to find algorithms to find the shortest path from one point to another, and
found the Liquid War algorithm. Then it came to his mind that a game could be
build upon this algorithm, and Liquid War was born. He programmed the first
two versions of Liquid War using Borland Pascal for DOS, and gave me some
information about the algorithm so that I could re-program it.
U-Foot¶
I'm the guy
who programmed the latest versions of Liquid War. I enhanced the algorithms,
and did quite a bunch of work to have the game playable by (almost) anyone,
that's to say create a correct GUI.
If you want
to join me, here's all the information you'll ever need:
Christian
Mauduit
E-mail: ufoot@ufoot.org
Web site: http://www.ufoot.org
GnuPG public key: FD409E94 - http://www.ufoot.org/gnupg.pub
GnuPG fingerprint: 4762 1EBA 5FA3 E62F 299C B0BB DE3F 2BCD FD40 9E94
Snail mail: 32 rue Jean Moulin 95100 Argenteuil FRANCE
Other contributors¶
As Liquid War
is now free software, protected by the GPL, anyone is allowed to view, edit,
modify, re-compile the source code, and distribute it, as long as Liquid War
is still distributed under the GPL.
Here's a list
of the contributors:
- *
- Alstar: drew a map, which is now included in the main distribution.
- *
- Peter Wang: ported Liquid War to GNU/Linux.
- *
- Cort Danger Stratton : helped me setting up network support.
- *
- Tim Chadburn : wrote midi files for the game. His contribution has been truely appreciated since it's rather hard to find GNU GPL compliant artwork. He also wrote documentation and helped with midi support in general.
- *
- Jan Gretschuskin : contributed 11 maps, and made the German translation. So if you run Liquid War with German menus, you know who you have to thank -> Jan! 8-) Also do not forget to visit http://www.game-factor.de
- *
- Mouse : contributed a map.
- *
- Rene Stach : drew 3 maps.
- *
- Roderick Schertler : implemented HTTP 1.1 support.
- *
- Ryan D. Brown : ported Liquid War to Mac OS X.
- *
- Eduard Bloch : maintained the Debian package, and helped with German support.
- *
- Michael Terry : provided a .desktop file for better integration with Gnome, KDE and other UNIX desktop environments.
- *
- Kasper Hviid : contributed many maps, with their own textures, and made the Danish translation. Great work, also available on http://levels.2v1.cz/index.html
- *
- David Redick : wrote an external random map generator, available on http://xdavidx.sqrville.org/lwmapgen/index.html
- *
- Alexandre Pineau : maintains the Debian package.
- *
- Michael Wagner : translated the web site in German.
- *
- Peter Williams : fixed the "too many opened socket" server bug.
- *
- Jan Samohyl : submitted strategy tips.
- *
- Gavin : wrote the Liquid War fanfic.
- *
- Dave Vasilevsky : fixed the Mac OS X port.
- *
- 2 of omega : contributed a map.
- *
- 666-REFIZUL-666 : created many maps (distributed separately).
- *
- Thomas Klausner : fixed Makefile for FreeBSD
- *
- Joan Dolc : helped with Mac OS/X port
Many other
people helped me by submitting bug reports and patches, and I want to thank
them for their precious help. Thanks to all the Debian people too, who nicely
maintain the Liquid War .deb package.
Mailing lists¶
liquidwar-user¶
- Description
This list is
for general discussions about Liquid War. Here you can make suggestions,
submit bug reports, ask for help, find players, etc... Basically, any question
or remark which concerns the game is welcomed on this list.
- Practical informations
You can't
send messages to the list without subscribing. The only reason for this is
that it's one of the only way to block spam efficiently. I first thought it
could be OK to allow anyone to post, but liquidwar-user seems to have be
harvested by robots, so now I need to restrict posters. However, I insist on
the fact that anyone can subscribe, and the subscription to the list is not
moderated. So if you are a human being and not a stupid spam robot, you're
welcome on the list 8-)
Here's a list
of usefull URLs:
- *
- To (un)subscribe: http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/liquidwar-user
- *
- To consult archives: http://mail.nongnu.org/pipermail/liquidwar-user/
- *
- To post on the list: liquidwar-user@nongnu.org
Chat and IRC¶
- Web-based chat-box
I have have
set up a web-based chat-box which is accessible here:
http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5/metaserver.php3
It's not as
good as a good old IRC channel but not everybody can use IRC (because of
firewalls and the likes), and I like the idea that people can chat and have
the list of available servers in one single web page.
- IRC channels
I personnally
spend some time on irc.freenode.net so you might use it to find other players
- though I'm not really an IRC addict... ...not yet at least!
Here are the
channels I recommend:
- *
- #liquidwar : Liquid War dedicated channel, to find players and chat while playing.
- *
- #netgame_players : general channel for players who want to
play Internet games - Free Software and/or Open Source games of course,
we're on freenode.net 8-)
Fanfic¶
What's this?¶
Quoting
Gavin: "I wrote a liquid war fanfic some time ago [...] I wrote it after
a friend claimed that there wasn't any liquid war fanfic because it wasn't
possible."
So here it
is, a Liquid War fanfic, enjoy! (and special thanks to Gavin)
The Battle of Emberlificoted¶
- ...
The General
presided over his massing army in his seat, or rather hovering ring, of power.
It dipped slightly as he flew low over his troops marching through the viscous
marsh-like terrain. They were like children: obedient, loyal, and they ate a
lot.
Glancing at
the status panel mounted in front of him he grimaced; the other five armies:
Yellow, Green, Orange, Turquoise, and, of course, Red, were also readying
armies of a similar size to his own. His violet clones would have to fight
hard and eat well to win this day.
Today would
not be a battle of luck, the General mused, it would be a battle of tactics,
of alliances, and of betrayal. Every clone was identical - that was the
general idea behind clones - and the terrain seemed strangely symmetrical; it
would not give advantage to any of the six armies amassed today. Glancing at
the hologram of the battlefield projected in front of him the General noted
that he would have to move quickly, Orange and Yellow were too close for
comfort, though fortunately Baron Red's army of eponymous coloured clones was
the furthest.
General
Violet's fingertips were sweaty even before they touched the four main control
keys in front of him. They were labeled 'W', 'A', 'D', and, of course, the
full retreat button - very useful for misleading foes and ambushing them as
they pursued - 'S'. The keys were arrange in a roughly equilateral triangular
pattern; with 'S' forming the base and being adjacent to both 'A' and 'D', 'W'
formed the tip of the triangle.
A long breath
left his parched lips as at last he made his move.
- ...
"Dammit!"
he screamed moments later. He had misjudged Captain Yellow and Commander
Orange; he had expected one at least to attack immediately, one he could have
handled. They were working together - foiling his attempt to shoot between
them to near the center of the battlefield to gain a better vantage point.
Yellow had shot down towards him, cutting off his advance, and now Orange had
sealed his escape route. "It's not over yet" muttered the General.
He opened a voice channel with Commander Orange:
"Very
clever. Flawed, but still clever."
"Flawed?"
came the reply.
"Yes
flawed, when the good Captain is finished devouring my army who do you think
he will turn to next?", bluffed the General - his hands worked quickly as
he manoeuvred his hovering control ring, all that his troops ever saw of him,
carefully towards the weakest section of his attackers. If he could just break
out a few units he could soon turn the tide against both Yellow and
Orange.
"We have
an alliance..." Orange's voice was unsure now.
Time for some
sarcasm to through her even more off balance, thought the General,
"I
gathered", he spoke softly, slowly, and with too much meaning. Then
closing the channel he turned his attention back to his escape.
- ...
"Yes!"
wooped the ecstatic figure of the General. Fifty or so of his troops had
broken free undetected and were even now working their way cautiously towards
the camps of the Yellow army, only the front lines were still actively
fighting; this opening gambit of Yellow and Orange had turned into a stale
siege and Yellow's army had pitched tent.
General
Violet steered his hovering guidance ring to the center of the Yellow camp.
His troops struck, both those who had got behind the lines and those who were
still besieged. Yellow reacted too slowly and suddenly found that her army,
was shrinking back from the onslaught. There was nowhere to run to, and bye
now her only ally - Commander Orange - had abandoned her to her fate; he was
too busy engaging Sir. Turquoise, who had managed to escape from the slaughter
that the Baron had caused to the Turquoise ranks and was even now valiantly
attacking the flanks of the Orange troops.
A glance at
the status panel showed that Yellow's life force was fading quickly: 8%, 3%,
1%, Gone.
The General
smiled, he always enjoyed getting the first kill, and by now his armies life
force had grown and his clones had replicated. With his, now, formidable
fighting force it was no problem to engulf both Sir. Turquoise and Commander
Orange's brawling armies and annihilate them. Once again his army grew in size
and power. Now if only the Baron didn't notice that..., thought the General.
- ...
"Too
late!" yelped the General, now thrown into panic, as he saw the
approaching Baron. His army had also grown in size and power - having fatally
injured the Turquoise army within the opening moments of the battle, and
having finally managed to catch the elusive fleeing form of, or what remained
of, Emperor Green.
Gripping the
controls harder the General thought quickly, his army doesn't so completely
outnumber me that this is already over, however unless I can cause him to make
a mistake that allows me to take the upper hand then I will inevitably lose.
Maybe I can...
This thought
was terminated and replaced by another as the Baron's angry red troops broke
through the undergrowth that had covered their movements and started to
surround the General's army. The thought that now throbbed through the
panic-stricken mind of General Violet was simply 'Run!'.
Even as he
signaled the retreat and made for what seemed to be the only possible means of
escape the Baron's blood red control ring appeared at the opening. The General
knew it was over, even before the host of red beings appeared at the
opening.
There was no
escape. His life force was almost depleted and he was surrounded. Then it was
that the Baron decided to communicate:
"Too
bad. It was a good game"
The General
blinked, gaped, and was generally gobsmacked. Just before his life force
completely failed and his own weary eyes closed in defeat he snarled,
"What!?
This is not a game!" were the General's dying words.
Menus and hot keys¶
Introduction¶
This section
describes how the GUI works. Since programming advanced GUIs with Allegro is
not so easy - standard C programming definitely lacks flexibility -, and also
since it's somewhat hard for me to figure out what is user-friendly and what's
not, Liquid War's menus are not always self-explanatory. I'll just try and do
something better next time!
Menus¶
- Map menu
The map menu
allows you to choose the map you are going to play on. A map is defined by 3
things:
- *
- A frame. The frame can be chosen with the slider which is below the preview. The frames are automatically sorted by alphabetical order.
- *
- A texture for walls.
- *
- A texture for the zone where fighters are allowed to move.
In the middle
of the screen, there is a preview of the level. In this menu, the values of
the parameters can be independently changed by:
- *
- Moving a slider.
- *
- Clicking on a "+" or a "-" button.
- *
- Typing a number.
On each side
of the preview, sliders allow you to choose the two textures. There is also a
preview of each texture. Below this preview there are 128 little buttons which
allow you to choose single colored textures.
The name of
the map and its resolution are displayed in the lower part of the
screen.
You'll notice
that on some maps the texture selection zones simply disappear. This is
because these maps are associated with a texture, so choosing a different
texture is often not recommended for it won't look as nice as with the right
one. If you still want to override this behaviour you can click on the
"on/off" button just right to the "Use default texture"
label. This is a toggle button which will allow you to use your own textures
even on maps that normally come with their own skin.
You'll also
notice that a "Random map" button is available. This button
generates a new random map using an external program, "lwmapgen",
developped by David Redick, available on
http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~dredick/lwmapgen/
This program
supports many command line options, and if you want a very precise control on
the generated maps, you'll need to run it separately. Looking at LW's log file
you should be able to see the commands LW issues when calling this program,
this can give you ideas on how to launch it manually. Alternatively using the
"--help" option (for instance "liquidwar-mapgen --help"
under UNIX) should describe how to use it.
- Teams menu
This menu
allows you to choose the teams which are going to play. There are 6 square
zones in this menu. Each of them is associated to a team.
Each team can
be either:
- *
- Disabled ("Off")
- *
- Controlled by a player ("Human")
- *
- Controlled by the computer ("Cpu")
The computer
plays poorly, so remember that Liquid War is basically a multiplayer game, and
that the cpu control is dedicated to beginners only.
You can also
choose the color associated to each team by clicking on one of the 12 colored
buttons.
Below the 12
colored buttons, there are four buttons which allow you to choose your keys.
Click on one of these buttons and then press the key you want to define.
Joystick movements and buttons are considered as keys. You can disable the
joystick with the button which is at the bottom left of the menu. Mouse input
is also possible, and mouse movements are considered as keys too. To define
mouse control, click on the button associated to the direction you want to
control, and then move the mouse. Then the button should display something
like "M->". Mouse sensibility can be set with the little slider
at the bottom right of the menu.
- Graphics menu
Here you can
choose the graphic options of the game.
The
"Video mode" button allows you to switch between fullscreen and
windowed mode. This button is not available under DOS.
The
"Brightness" slider allows you to set the brightness of the
game.
The
"Menu res" slider allows you to set the resolution used by the
menus. There are currently 5 possible values, which depend on which platform
you're running the game on.
I personnaly
think the menus look best with the 640x480 resolution, but some may prefer
higher resolutions. Lower resolutions should only be used if you have problems
using SVGA video modes.
The
"Game res" slider allows you to set the resolution used during the
game. The allowed values are the same than those for the menus. I recommend
that you don't use resolution higher than 640x480, unless you have a Pentium
VIII running a 10GHz.
Page flipping
can be toggled. It is up to you to decide wether you keep this option or not.
The main disavantage of turning page flipping off is that the info bar and the
battlefield can look rahter ugly if they overlap. But if you turn page
flipping on you will not easily reach the 166 frames per second I sometimes
get on small levels with my K6-225. I personnaly always turn page flipping
off.
The viewport
size defines how much of your screen will be used by the battlefield.
- *
- If you set the slider on its left position, the batllefield will not be stectched at all. Or if is strechted, it will be by a x2 or a x4 factor. So this is the mode wich allows the fastest display.
- *
- If you set the slider ont its right position, the game will run in fullscreen mode.
- *
- With all the other positions of the slider, the battlefield
will keep its general proportions but it will be stretched.
The
"Waves" button allows you to toggle the wave effect. You can also do
this while playing, by simply pressing F4.
- Sound menu
This section
allows you to set the sound volumes. There are 4 sliders, which are:
- *
- "Sfx": sets the volume of all the sfx sounds, thats to say'the sounds you hear when the game starts, when you loose etc...
- *
- "Click": sets the volume of the click, this nasty noise you hear each time your press on a button.
- *
- "Game water": sets the volume of the blop blop blop sounds which are played continuously while you are playing.
- *
- "Menu water": the same thing than "Game water" except that it concerns the sounds played while your are choosing options.
- *
- "Music": general music volume.
- Rules menu
This menu is
the one where you can change the rules of the game.
The
"Time" slider controls the time limit. The game will stop after this
time is elapsed. You can pause the game by pressing the "F3"
key.
By the way,
an info bar can display the time left while you are playing. This info bar can
be toggled during the game by pressing the "F1" key, and you can
change its location by pressing the "F2" key. It also displays how
many fighters there are in each team.
The
"Army size" slider controls the amount of fighters there will be on
the battlefield. The position of the slider reflects the amount of fighters of
all the teams together. If there are 4 teams, then each player will have half
as many fighters than if there had only been 2 teams.
The
"Cursor x" slider controls the speed of your cursor.
- *
- If it is set on the left, the cursor goes at the same speed than the fighters.
- *
- If it is centered, the cursor goes twice faster than the fighters.
- *
- If it is set on the right, the speed of the cursor is
multiplicated by 3.
Below is a
"Min 160x100" box with a slider on its right. This means that maps
will automatically be magnified so that they have a size of at least 160x100.
Indeed, some of the maps that come with Liquid War were designed in 1995 when
486 Intel computers were common. Therefore the maps were smalls. Today, these
maps are not really fun to play on fast computers, so Thomas Harte suggested
this automatic magnifying feature, and that was IMHO a smart idea. You can
move the slider to the right to make maps use a higher resolution - ie magnify
them.
The
"Defaults" button of the "Rules" menu will reset rules to
their defaults. This way you can tweak rules and then come back to the default
rules whenever you want. Note that there's also a "Defaults" button
in the main "Options" menu, but it will reset *all* options,
including player names... The advantage of the "Defaults" button in
the "Rules" menu is that it will only reset rules parameters, and
keep the rest of your configuration options untouched.
- Speeds menu
The
"frames/s" slider allows you to limit the number of frames per
second. If this slider is set on the left, there won't be any limit, so Liquid
War will repaint your screen each time the fighters move. But this can be a
weird behaviour if your machine is really fast, for no one cares about 100 fps
per second, one can not even see them... So this paramters limits the
refreshment rate, so that there can be several logical moves of the fichters
for only one screen refreshing. If it is set on its right, the display is
limite to 10 fps, so you'll have to find your setting. I personnally set it
right in the middle, and get 40 fps. If you press "F5", you'll get
the number of frames per second, and if you press "F6", you'll get
the number of logical moves per second. You can also press "F7" or
"F8", and you will get the percentage of time your computer spends
on calculating or displaying the level.
The
"rounds/s" slider allows you to limit the number of rounds per
second. If this slider is set on the left, there won't be any limit, so Liquid
War will run as fast as possible. This setting will be of no use if you use
Liquid War on a slow computer or if you play with hudge maps, but sometimes,
with a high-end Pentium class computer, it's simply impossible to play on
small maps because things simply go too fast. So this parameter is here to
help you and avoid the "10000 moves per sec" problem.
- Waves menu
This is where
the wave parameters are set. The waves are just a graphic effect, which is not
really usefull. I don't often use waves, but I still think they can sometimes
look nice. Change these parameters if you really mean to do it, but if you
don't understand what they mean, it is really OK...
There are 4
different types of waves, each of them being defined by:
- *
- An "Ampli" parameter, to define how big the waves have to be.
- *
- A "Number" parameter, to define how many waves should be displayed at the same time.
- *
- A "Speed" parameter, to define how fast the waves
should move.
If you want
to undestand what the "WX", "HY", "WY", and
"HX" codes mean, try to pay with only one type of wave, the
"Ampli" parameter of the 3 other types of wave being set to 0 (that
is to say the slider is on its left position), and sea how it looks
like.
The wave
effects can be toggled during the game by pressing the "F4" key.
- Advanced menu
This menu
allows the user to change the behaviour of the fighters.
The
"Attack" slider sets the agressivity of the fighters. If it is set
on the right, fighters eat each other very fast. If it is set on the left, it
takes ages to fighters to change teams.
The
"Defense" slider sets the capacity that the fighters have to
regenerate themselves. The more it is on the right, the faster fighters
regenerate.
The "New
health" slider sets the health of the fighters which have just changed
teams. The more it is on the left, the weaker these fighters will be.
The
"Winner help" slider controls a parameter which causes fighters to
attack with various strength depending on how many fighters belong to their
team. Not very clear... Let's just say that:
- *
- If this slider is set on the right, the more fighters you have in your team, the more aggressive they will become.
- *
- If it is centered, all the fighters of every team will always attack with the same strength.
- *
- If it is set on the left, the less fighters you have, the
stronger they will be. In this mode, games usually never end.
The "Cpu
strength" parameter never makes the computer more intelligent than a
monkey. But if you set it on the right, it advantages the machine outrageously
and fighters controlled by the cpu will be really strong. So to get rid of
them you'll definitely need to be clever. Again and again, don't forget that
Liquid War was conceived as a multiplayer game and that playing against the
computer is not really an interesting thing to do.
The "CPU
vs human" parameter allows you to control how aggressive CPUs are towards
humans.
- *
- If set to "Always", CPUs will always attack humans and will never try to attack another CPU, unless there are no humans left. This used to be the default behavior in previous Liquid War versions, but some players remarked that it was rather unfair, so now this is an option.
- *
- If set to "Random", CPUs won't care wether their opponents are CPUs or humans, they'll attack anybody. This is the default behavior.
- *
- It set to "Never", CPUs will attack each other
before bothering human players.
The
"Allow net bots" button can be used to allow bots to connect on
network games. Indeed, bots are by default disabled in network games, since in
this case LW assumes that bots are useless (there are already several human
players). However, turning this option on will allow you to connect bots
within the game. It's important to note that this is a per client option, this
means that you can't use it to forbid access to bots to a given network game.
This option was simply created to avoid confusion when connecting on network
games, while still allowing bots to connects if you really want them to.
The
"Algorithm" parameter allows you to force the algorithm to standard
C mode. There's no real good reason you would like to do this, since the C
algorithm is slower than the ASM one. Moreover, the ASM algorithm is
automatically disabled if you play against a computer which does not have ASM
enabled. Think of this as a testing/debugging option.
Hot keys¶
Here's a list
of keys you might use while playing:
- *
- F1: toggles the "info" zone where the game time and the state of each team is displayed.
- *
- F2: moves the "info" the zone arround, possible positions being top, right, bottom and left.
- *
- F3: pauses the game. This function is disabled during network games.
- *
- F4: toggles the "wave effect". Without this "wave effect", which is turned on ny default,the game will run faster.
- *
- F5: displays the number of frames per second (*).
- *
- F6: displays the number of rounds per second (*).
- *
- F7: displays the precentage of CPU spent on the game logic, calculating where fighters must go for instance (*).
- *
- F8: displays the precentage of CPU spent on graphics (*).
- *
- F9: turns on/off the "capture" mode. In this mode, screenshots of each frame are taken, and written to the hard drive as bitmaps.
- *
- F10: quits the game right away without any confirmation
prompt, also known as the "my boss is coming here!" function.
(*) all these
figures tend to be clearly false as computer go faster and faster. Basically,
the time required for "logic" and "display" operations is
getting shorter and shorter, and the tools I use to measure it are not precise
enough. Therefore I get approximations which might by plainly wrong.
Network game¶
Basics¶
Since release
5.4.0, Liquid War includes network support, that's to say that people can play
over a LAN (Local Area Network). However, due to limitations in Liquid War's
legacy code, and also because of the lack of time I have, it might be a little
tricky to set up a network game at first. So please read this section
carefully.
You should
keep in mind that:
- *
- DOS only releases of Liquid War do not include network support, only Windows and GNU/Linux versions will allow you to set up a network game.
- *
- The game should run fine on any LAN, but there's no garantee the game will be playable on the Internet. Indeed if your "ping delay" is not good enough, the game will be awfully slow. Bandwidth is not an issue, since Liquid War rarely needs more than 2 Kb/sec.
- *
- You'll need to know what an IP address is.
- *
- You don't need to set up a network game to run a
multiplayer game. Liquid War was originally a multiplayer game without
network support. Network support is here only for people who don't feel
comfortable when playing at 6 on the same keyboard 8-)
Getting started¶
- What do you need?
You'll
basically need 2 computers connected on the same LAN. We'll call them computer
A and B. You might be able to play over the Internet too, but the game can be
harder to set up and - which is worse - very slow.
You'll also
need to know the IP address of computer A. Type "ipconfig" under
Windows or "ifconfig" as root under GNU/Linux to get this
information if you don't have it.
- Starting the server
Liquid War
uses a very traditionnal client/server approach. Basically, the server gets
informations from all the clients and then dispatches the collected
information to everybody.
So you'll
need to start a server on computer A by running "liquidwar-server"
on GNU/Linux or "lwwinsrv.exe" on windows. This is a console
application, ie it does not set up any graphic mode.
Here's a
small example of a server start on GNU/Linux:
$
liquidwar-server
How many teams will connect to this server?
At this point
you must enter a number between 2 and 6, and then press "ENTER". In
this example we will answer 2. The server really needs to know how many teams
will be in the game: when enough teams are connected, the game starts. It can
also be a good idea to answer 6 systematically and then force game start by
clicking the "Start now" button within the client. It's possible to
skip this question by typing "liquidwar-server -2" instead of a
plain "liquidwar-server".
Use
"-2" to get rid of this question.
Register on "www.ufoot.org/metaserver/" (y/n)?
Now if we
answer "y", then the server will automatically contact the
"meta-server" and it will be listed on
http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5/metaserver.php3
This can be
convenient for people who want to find other gamers to play with on the Net.
For now, let's answer "n", we'll test this meta-server stuff later
8-)
Use
"-private" to get rid of this question.
2002-06-03 16:43:00: Listening on port 8035...
2002-06-03 16:43:00: Waiting for 2 teams...
Now the
server is ready to accept clients. By default it listens to clients on port
8035. You could change this behavior setting by calling "liquidwar-server
-port 8061" for instance, but let's use the default port to make things
easier.
- Starting the clients
Start the
client on computer A normally by typing "liquidwar" on GNU/Linux or
double-click "lwwin.exe" on Windows.
Go to the
"Teams" menu and select 2 teams, a red human and a blue CPU for
instance. If you don't know how to do this, then try and play Liquid War on a
single computer first. It's important to notice that by default the "blue
CPU" won't connect on the network game. It's possible to allow bots to
connect on network games, but they are disabled by default.
Now come back
to the main menu, and a "Net Game" button should be available. Click
it. Now you should be able to:
- *
- Start the game.
- *
- Change the IP address of the server.
- *
- Change the communication port.
- *
- Set a password.
- *
- Search for internet games automatically.
Since the
server is also running on the same machine (A), you can leave the default IP
address as is (127.0.0.1).
Now you are
ready to start the second client on computer B. Like with computer A, you'll
have to:
- *
- Select 2 teams, green an yellow this time.
- *
- Select "Net Game" in the main menu.
But this time
you'll also need to change the server address, since the client is not running
on the same computer than the server.
Now click on
"Start game" on computer A. The server should play a "system
beep", which is usefull if you run a server and want to be notified of
client connections without watching the console all the time, and it should
display messages like this:
2002-06-03
16:44:48: Connection from "127.0.0.1:34677"
2002-06-03 16:44:48: Team "Napoleon" on client
"127.0.0.1:34677" accepted
2002-06-03 16:44:49: Client "127.0.0.1:34677" accepted
2002-06-03 16:44:49: Waiting for 1 team...
And on the
client you should see a screen which says "Waiting for 1 team(s)"
with the list of connected players below (Napoleon). You do not need to click
on the "Start now" button.
Now click on
"Start game" on computer B. The server should display messages like
this:
2002-06-03
16:49:14: Connection from "192.168.1.1:1098"
2002-06-03 16:49:14: Team "Henri IV" on client
"192.168.1.1:1098" accepted
2002-06-03 16:49:15: Client "192.168.1.1:1098" accepted
2002-06-03 16:49:15: Client "192.168.1.1:1098" ready
2002-06-03 16:49:15: Client "127.0.0.1:34677" ready
2002-06-03 16:49:15: Sending info to "127.0.0.1:34677"
2002-06-03 16:49:15: Sending info to "192.168.1.1:1098"
2002-06-03 16:49:16: Game start
And at that
point, the game should start 8-)
- Restart a new game
Once the game
is over, you can start another network game on the clients without touching
the server, because the server automatically restarts and waits for players to
connect.
To stop the
server - if you want to change its settings for instance - just go to the
console where it's running and press CTRL-C.
Using the meta-server¶
- Basics
The
meta-server is a piece of software which is running on my web site, and allows
servers to register themselves so that client can get a list of available
servers.
It's written
in PHP and is _very_ basic but I believe it's enough for what has to be done:
maintain a list of running servers.
The source
code for the meta-server is included in the source package of Liquid War, so
you might run such a server yourself if you want to. However, by default,
servers will register themselves on my web site, and will be listed on
http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5/metaserver.php3
- How to register a server
Launch the
server, and when you get the question:
Register on
"www.ufoot.org/metaserver/" (y/n)?
answer
"y".
Note that if
you're behind a proxy or a firewall, the server might be unable to register
itself. Clients might also have problems to connect themselves on your server
if there's a machine which does NAT (Network Address Translation) between you
and the meta-server.
- How to find a server
In the main
menu, click on "Net Game" and then "Search for internet
games".
Now you
should see a list of available servers. You can click on the items in the list
to get more informations about a given server. Once you have chosen a server,
click on "Join now".
Now you get
on a "Waiting for teams" screen. You might be interested in using
the "Start now" button. Indeed, if you are 4 players connected on a
server that accepts up to 6 players, maybe you'll want to start the game right
away without waiting for 2 more players. In this case, every player must click
"Start now". A "*" character will replace the
"-" in the players list when a player clicks on "Start
now". When all the players are displayed with a "*a, the game
starts.
You can also
chat with other players by entering text in the area above the "Send
message" button, and then click on this button. Keep in mind that this is
a very primitive chat and that the best way to chat efficiently is IMHO to
play in windowed mode and have an IRC client at hand.
Note that you
can also get the list of available servers from
http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5/metaserver.php3 There you'll also find a
little chat-box which will allow you to send exchange messages with other
players.
Options¶
- Server options
You can pass
options to the server using the command line. The following parameters are
accepted:
- *
- "-n" where "n" is a number between 2 and 6 : with this option you can tell the server how many teams will connect to the game. Beware, there can be several teams on the same computer, so if you want to have a computer with 2 players on it and 2 other computers with a single player, then you need to use the "-4" option.
- *
- "-lag n" where "n" is an integer : with this option, you can control the lag used at startup. Normally, Liquid War handles this parameter automatically, but you might want to force it to a given value.
- *
- "-port n" where "n" is an integer : allows you to change the IP port used by the server to listen to the clients. if you omit this parameter, the default port is (8035) is used.
- *
- "-log file.log" : dumps all informations in "file.log" instead of using the standard output.
- *
- "-public" : skips the "Register on ..." question, and registers the server automatically on the meta-server, so that clients can find it easily.
- *
- "-private" : skips the "Register on ..." question, and does not register the server at all.
- *
- "-comment This_is_a_comment" : associates a comment to the server, which will be displayed by the meta-server. Note that the character "_" will be replaced by spaces. This makes command line parsing easier. I'm lazy 8-)
- *
- "-password xxx" : associates a password to the server. With this option, clients will need to give the right password to be able to connect on the server.
- *
- "-callback cmd" : with this option, the command
"cmd" will be launched whenever someone connects on an empty
server. For instance, if you want to run a permanent server and want to
know when someone connects but do not wish to permanently keep an eye on
the server's log, you might use this option and put in "cmd" a
command that automatically sends you a mail. You might also use a command
that fires a popup window. It's up to you. 2 sample scripts are available
in the "misc" directory of the Liquid War source distribution.
One is "misc/liquidwar_notify.sh" and works on UNIX platforms,
and the other one is "misc/lwpopup.js", which is automatically
used by "misc/lwserver.bat", and works on Windows.
- Common options
These options
work on both client and server, even if they are rather
"server-oriented".
- *
- "-metaserver url" : redefines the URL of the meta-server. Usefull if you want to use your own meta-server.
- *
- "-netlog" : if you use this option, the server will dump all the network traffic on the standard output. This is usefull for debugging.
- *
- "-nobeep" : Disables the system beeps that the
application might fire. These beeps are mostly used on the server to
notify clients connections.
About Liquid War's network implementation¶
- Basics
Liquid War
uses TCP sockets, and a single-threaded server. This implies that:
- *
- The game can sometimes get blocked if you play on Internet.
- *
- The server can't talk simultaneously with several clients.
I needed to
use TCP sockets, since LW's algorithm can not cope with any data loss and it's
not a reasonnable to try and anticipate what the map would be like if the
player did not move etc...
I did not
implement any complex multithreaded stuff since I'm lazy and however, clients
need to have informations about all the other before something can be done.
However, implementing a mutltithreaded server could have advantages over the
current solution.
- What is this lag stuff anyway?
In Liquid
War, all the clients send their key presses to the server, and then the server
dispatches this information to everyone. This has to be done for every
round.
You can
easily imagine that if a player has a poor connection, with a very long
"ping delay", it can take quite a long time to send the information
to the server, and then get it back.
So what
Liquid War does is that at the beginning of the game, the server sends a
couple of "blank" key strokes to the clients. This way, clients
receive data from the server before thay have sent any. The number of key
strokes sent at the beginning of the game is called the "lag".
So if it
takes 200 msec to send and then receive data from the server (approx the time
returned by the "ping" command) then with a lag of 6, you can
theorically play at a rate of (1/0.2)*6=30 rounds/sec.
On one hand,
setting the lag parameter to a high value will avoid many network errors and
allow you to play at a very fast pace, but the big drawback is that there will
be quite a long time between the instant you send a key stroke to the server
and the moment it comes back to you. On the other hand, setting the lag to a
low value will limit drastically he number of rounds per second, but make the
game more "responsive".
However,
since release 5.4.1, the "lag" is modified automatically and should
adapt itself to the situation. I've not been able to test it in real
conditions yet, but it should work 8-)
Still,
setting the lag to a sensible default value can save you some trouble. Indeed,
by default, Liquid War will choose a value (6), but it can not guess if you
are playing on Internet or on a 100 Mbit LAN, and it can take quite a long
time before Liquid War automatically finds the right value. To know the right
value which should be used with the "-lag" option, simply play a few
games and watch the average lag (which is displayed on the server console
every minute) at the end of the game.
- Performance issues
Liquid War
uses a "light" server, and one of the advantages of this solution is
that it allows you to run the server on low-end computers. I personnally run a
permanent server on a 486 DX2, and it runs like a charm.
The only
thing you have to take care of when running a server is bandwidth. Don't
worry, you won't need a 10Mbit connection, basically, each clients sends and
receives 12 bytes of data at each round. If you add TCP/IP headers and the
facts that stuff will probably be bundled in bigger packets, a client must
deliver about 15 Kbit/sec (up and down) for a game that runs at 100
frames/sec. A 56K V90 modem is enough for this.
So if you run
a server with 2 clients connected, the server will need to deliver 30 Kbit/sec
in both ways. A 56K V90 modem _can_ do that, but your provider needs to be a
good one 8-)
And if you
run a server with 6 clients, you simply won't be able to reach the 100
frames/sec with a 56K V90 modem. It will necessarly drop to something less
than 30 frames/sec, and is likely to drop to about 15 frames/sec. OK this is
not a big deal, since few Internet games run at more than 30 frames/sec, but
well, if the server has troubles receiving/sending data, everyone will wait,
and the fun will go away.
As a
conclusion: if you have the choice, choose the friend who has the best
bandwidth to run the server, without even considering the power of his
computer.
Troubleshooting¶
- General information
Network
support in 5.4 and 5.5 is still experimental in many ways, so you might get
weird behaviors. Basically, if you have a problem, just do the
following:
- *
- Stop and restart the server when something goes wrong. To stop it, use CTRL-C.
- *
- Check out that you have entered the correct IP addresses.
- *
- Try and start the client and the server using the
"-netlog" option to have an idea about what's happening.
- Bugs in 5.4.x corrected in 5.4.2
Liquid War
5.4.0 and 5.4.1 were very hard to play over the Internet. The reason is that
the network routines did not do enough error checking, and therefore there
were very often errors when sending and/or receiving the map to the server.
Hopefully, this bug should not appear anymore in 5.4.2 or any other recent
release.
About security¶
- Network games passwords
As you might
have noticed, under the box where you can enter the password, a little notice
explains that you must choose a "weak" password. Now you'll tell me
-> people keep on explaining me that passwords must be something complex
like "aS\r!Y9p" and now I'm told to use "hello", what's
up?
OK, keep in
mind Liquid War is a game. This password stuff is just a way to be able to
play with your friends only and keep on using the meta-server's services.
Liquid War does not encrypt data and I can see no good reason to do it for, so
the password is stored and sent to the server in clear, as plain text.
The
consequence is that if you use a valuable password - for instance the one you
use to log in on your computer - the guy who runs the server will see your
password in the log file if he wishes to. Therefore, use something weak,
something that if someones finds out what it is, you won't really care. So
"hello" is a wise choice.
- Is Liquid War likely to have security holes?
Yes.
Any program
is likely to have security holes, especially when it's networked. However, I
have good reasons to think that Liquid War is safe enough for a game. At least
I find it safe enough to run a permanent public server on my personnal
computer 8-)
FYI, here are
some things which I think make Liquid War rather safe to run:
- *
- Liquid War does not store anything on your hard drive that would have been received from the network. The maps are kept in RAM. So you won't download any virus playing Liquid War on Internet.
- *
- Liquid War does not transmit any sort of code on the network. All the transmitted bytes represent plain data. So you're not likely to execute any arbitrary code - virus, worm - when playing on the Net.
- *
- Liquid War receives network packets in static buffers, and if the received data is too big, it is truncated. One consequence is that Liquid War has a bunch of "limits". You can't send hudge maps over the network, you can't have long nicknames, and so on. But another consequence is that if you try to send garbage in the buffer, it will be truncated. Liquid War will protest with a "network error" message and the connection will be closed, but there will be no easy exploit possible here.
- *
- Liquid War does not use the sprintf, strcpy and strcat functions, which are known as being rather unsecure since they can lead to buffer overflows. Instead, it uses the equivalent functions snprintf, strncpy and strncat. On platforms where these functions are supported natively, the game will use the default system functions, otherwise it will use a free implementation by Mark Martinec. FYI, Windows does not support snprintf-like functions natively, that is, it's a piece of crap.
- *
- Liquid War is Free Software, so I'm not likely to have put
backdoors in it myself, since anyone can look at the source code 8-)
However, I
have not - and I know nobody who has - audited Liquid War for security holes.
So there might be some. Therefore you should respect a few things while
running Liquid War:
- *
- Never run Liquid War as root or administrator. This is obvious but I still mention it. If you want to run a Liquid War daemon on UNIX, run it as user "nobody" or something approaching. If "root" or "administrator" does not make sense on your system (DOS, Win98...) then I assume you're not _really_ concerned about security anyway 8-P
- *
- If you run a server 7/7 24/24, use the "-log" option to log everything in a file. This way you'll keep a trace of network activity, and if something goes wrong, you might get a chance to see it.
- *
- If you use passwords in network games, *never* choose a valuable password. Use something simple like "hello" or "goodbye".
- *
- Keep in mind that Liquid War is a game, and not a bullet
proof professionnal server.
Last point:
you should be aware that version 5.4.5 of Liquid War has been proved to be
vulnerable to a local buffer overflow, and one should run at least 5.5.9 to
get rid of this problem. FYI by the time the exploit was found on 5.4.5, 5.5.9
was already out 8-) See http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/8629 and
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/9453 for more informations.
- Can people cheat when playing on the Net?
No.
Or at least,
not really. In fact, you can still find the following types of lamers:
- *
- A guy who lets the CPU play at his place. He'll loose anyway because the CPU is definitely not a great Liquid War Master 8-)
- *
- A guy who tweaks the game and gets all his bots fight anyone he wishes. That's mean.
- *
- A guy who manages to let you have a 500msec lag while he
does not have any lag at all.
Apart from
this, I can hardly see any way to cheat. Why? Because the Liquid War server
does not store any information about the game. It's not aware of who wins, who
looses, it knows nothing. The only thing it does is to transmit key presses
between client computers.
This way, if
someone plays with a tweaked release of Liquid War, thinking he will fool you,
then he will fool you on his computer only... On your computer, everything
will be fine. After some time, your screen and his screen will have nothing in
common, and both players are likely to think they have won. Except the lamer
will stay a lamer.
This also
explains why it's required to play with the very same versions of the game
during network games. If you plug a 5.5.2 with a 5.5.1, after a minute the
screens will be completely different on each client, since there are subtle
differences between the 5.5.1 and the 5.5.2 engine. However, you shouldn't be
able to do this, since a network error will stop you before you can start to
play.
Additionnally,
versions 5.5.5 and higher have a checksum system. Every 100 rounds, each
client calculates a checksum with its local map, and sends it to the server.
If the checksum is incorrect, the server will log a message like:
Checksum
error on client "192.168.1.1:1098"
If you see
this, then you're in one of the following situations:
- *
- There's a bug in the game
- *
- A lamer tries to cheat
FYI, all
releases from 5.4.0 to 5.5.4 have a bug which causes clients to desynchronize
after a while...
Command line parameters¶
Introduction¶
When you
launch Liquid War 5, you can use command line options. If you have no problems
launching Liquid War, this section should not interest you very much.
You can use
several options at the same time. The basic syntax for options looks like
this:
lw -option1
-option2 parameter2 -option3 parameter3 -option4 -option5
Note that
most of the options are legacy options which where usefull with the initial
releases of Liquid War, when you had to run in a Windows DOS box, and when
there were still plenty of 486 computers with only 8Mb ram...
Version checking¶
These are
basic options which can be usefull to figure out which release of Liquid War
is installed.
- *
- "-v" : returns the version number of the program.
- *
- "-h" : displays a short description and copyright
information.
Changing default paths¶
Very usefull
options, especially if you can not install Liquid War in default directories
or want to put the game in a special place.
- *
- "-cfg myconfigfile.cfg" : causes Liquid War to use the specified config file.
- *
- "-dat mydatafilefile.dat" : causes Liquid War to use the specified datafile. This might be a very interesting option if you run Liquid War on a GNU/Linux box where you do not have root access and therefore can not put the datafile in /usr.
- *
- "-map mycustommapdir" : causes Liquid War to use the specified directory as the user map directory. The user map directory is where you can put plain bitmaps to be used as maps.
- *
- "-tex mycustomtexturedir" : causes Liquid War to use the specified directory as the user texture directory. The user texture directory is where you can put plain bitmaps to be used as textures.
- *
- "-mid mycustommusicdir" : causes Liquid War to use the specified directory as the user music directory. Any midi file placed in this directory will be added to the list of available musics.
- *
- "-server myliquidwarserverfile" : causes Liquid War to use the specified file as the server executable. This option has no effect for now since the server is not launched by the client.
- *
- "-mapgen mylwmapgenfile" : causes Liquid War to
use the specified file as the "lwmapgen" executable.
"lwmapgen" is an utility by David Redick which generates random
maps automatically for Liquid War. You might wish to change this option if
random map generation does not work for some reason, or if you want to use
your own map generator.
Troubleshooting switches¶
These options
give you control on how Liquid War treats initialisation errors, how much
memory it should reserve, what kind of video mode sit should not choose
etc...
- *
- "-vga" : This option forces Liquid War to use your video card as if it was only a basic VGA card. This option is required if you play Liquid War from Windows NT.
- *
- "-no400300" : This option disables the VGA 400x300 video mode. I created this options for I know that some video cards/monitors don't support the 400x300 mode.
- *
- "-silent" : With this option, Liquid War will not play any sound. It will not search for any sound card. This can be interesting if you don't have any sound card or if Liquid War doesn't handle your card correctly.
- *
- "-nowater" : Causes Liquid War not to load any water sound. Use this if Liquid War runs short of memory, and you should gain about 850kb.
- *
- "-nosfx" : Causes Liquid War not to load any sound fx. Use this if Liquid War runs short of memory, and you should gain about 150kb.
- *
- "-nomusic" : Causes Liquid War not to load any midi music.
- *
- "-mem n" : The parameter "n" sets the amount of memory (in Mb) Liquid War will allocate to do all its calculus. If this number is too small, you won't be able to play on all the levels. If it is too high, Liquid War may not start at all or crash while you are playing. The default value is 8. If you play Liquid War from Windows and Liquid War refuses to run because this parameter is too high, then try and give more dpmi memory to Liquid War.
- *
- "-nojoy" : This option disables joystick support.
- *
- "-noback" : Causes Liquid War not to load the background image. Use this if Liquid War runs short of memory, and you should gain about 300kb.
- *
- "-notex" : Causes Liquid War not to load any texture. Use this if Liquid War runs short of memory, and you should gain about 750kb.
- *
- "-auto" : If you set this option, Liquid War won't generate any error while allocating memory or loading data.
- *
- "-safe" : With this option, you will play with a very reduced version of Liquid War. It looks rather ugly but should work in a DOS box with only 4Mb of DPMI memory. Use this if you experience serious memory or device problems. If Liquid War doesn't start with this option turned on, I really don't think I can do anything for you...
- *
- "-nice" : With this option, Liquid War will use a mode which is between the default mode and the "safe" mode.
- *
- "-check" : With this option, Liquid War will stop as soon as it detects something strange while initializing.
- *
- "-stop" : If you set this option, Liquid War will prompt you for a key when the init process is completed.
- *
- "-c" : This is a weird option, if you turn it on,
the game will only use fonctions which are programmed in C langage. The
default behaviour is to use some functions I rewrote in assembly langage,
so that the game is a little faster.
Debug options¶
These options
are usefull if you want to debug the game and trace what's happening.
- *
- "-netlog" : Dumps all the network traffic on the
standard output. This can help finding problems when trying to connect to
the server in a network game.
Server options¶
The server
command line options are described in the section which deals which network
games in general. IMHO you need to understand how network works in LW before
trying to tweak the server 8-)
Other options¶
Everything
else 8-)
- *
- "-capture" : Activates the capture mode. In this mode, the game will dump a .bmp file on the disk several times per second, which is usefull if you want to create an mpeg movie of your game session afterwards. You can also activate this mode interactively by pressing F9 within the game.
- *
- "-metaserver url" : redefines the URL of the meta-server. Usefull if you want to use your own meta-server.
- *
- "-nobeep" : Disables the system beeps that the application might fire. These beeps are mostly used on the server to notify clients connections.
- *
- "-tombola" : Activates a special mode where
scores are not displayed normally. Instead, the game displays 3 random
numbers between 1 - 500.
lwmapgen options¶
The external
lwmapgen program by David Redick accepts a number of command line options. You
can type:
liquidwar-mapgen
--help
to get a list
of all available options under UNIX. Under Windows the command would be:
lwwinmap
--help
Note that
lwmapgen is called automatically by Liquid War when you click on the
"Random map" button.
The idea
behind lwmapgen is that you choose a function which sets the type of map
generated, and then pass various arguments to this function. If you do not
explicitly choose a function, one will be picked up for you randomly, and all
other parameters will use default values.
The most
usefull and common options are:
- *
- "--help" : displays help.
- *
- "--out filename" : save bitmap to filename.
- *
- "--size n" : bitmap size (an integer between 0 and 5).
- *
- "--list" : list all available functions.
- *
- "--function function_name" : which function to
use.
Here's a
typical use of lwmapgen:
liquidwar-mapgen
--size 3 --function hole --out test.bmp
Platform specific issues¶
General remarks¶
Liquid War is
now a cross-platform game, thanks to Allegro. So now you can play under
different OS.
The same
source tree will compile on all supported platforms, but with slight
differences when running. C preprocessor #defines are used to code some
platform specific stuff, and in some cases there are different files for the
DOS, Windows and UNIX versions.
As I said, I
try to use the same code for all platforms. This is in the long term the best
choice. Otherwise there would different branches of the source tree, and I
don't think this is a very good solution.
Therefore
some optimizations that were performed in the old DOS-only version have been
totally removed, for they were 100% platform dependent (ie mode-X asm coding).
So the new versions are all a little slower than the old 5.1 stuff, but the
performance loss is only about 20%, which is not significant with today's PCs.
And anyways the performance loss is most of the time limited to the goog old
VGA 320x200x8 mode-X, which starts being kind of obsolete.
DOS¶
This is the
original version. It's the fastest one as far as I know, the safest one and it
will always be I think, since Allegro was first designed for DOS, and DOS
allows a full unconditionnal access to all the hardware ressources LW
requires. LW doesn't use any hardware acceleration and it's not been designed
to do so. Unfortunately there's no network support for the DOS version of
Liquid War.
Windows¶
When running
under a Windows box, the DOS release used to be safer than the native Windows
port. Now that DOS support is getting really poor with recent versions of
Windows, the native Windows release of Liquid War starts begin the good choice
for Windows users. And Allegro for Windows is getting quite stable in the 4.x
series.
The other
reason to choose this release rather than the DOS release is that it has
network support.
If you have
problems running Liquid War under Windows, please check out the
"data\lwwin.log" file which should be written each time you run the
game. It contains the information which is displayed on the console under
other platforms, and might give you a clue about what's going wrong.
GNU/Linux¶
This port is
the most recent one, and also the one I prefer. Paths have been changed to an
UNIXish style, ie the data is stored in:
/usr/local/share/games/liquidwar
the
executable in:
/usr/local/games
and the
configuration file is
~/.liquidwarrc
Since not all
GNU/Linux distributions have /usr/local/games in their path, I also put a
symbolic link to the binaries in /usr/local/bin. I believe Liquid War is quite
FHS compliant, so if its default directories do not match your configuration,
blame your distro for not following the standards 8-) AFAIK the only touchy
directory is /usr/local/share/pixmaps which I've seen on many distribution but
does not seem to be referenced in the FHS.
With the
latest releases of Allegro, Liquid War is becoming pretty stable under
GNU/Linux. You should also know that the GNU/Linux port is usually the most up
to date, since I very very seldom boot Windows at home and do most of the
coding under GNU/Linux.
FreeBSD¶
This is the
latest port, so I expect it to be a little touchy to install and/or run for
some time.
Note that to
compile the game you'll need to install GNU tools like gmake and gcc. Liquid
War won't compile with the genuine make and cc commands.
One thing you
might ask is: "why do you provide the binary as a plain .tgz file, it
would be much nicer if a standard FreeBSD port was provided instead!".
The answer is that the statically linked binary should work flawlessly and
does not raise any dependency problem. Also I don't know how to make a BSD
port and I'm not really interested in doing it. If it's easy to do, then
someone can simply do it and send it back to me. If it's hard to do, then I do
not really have the time nor motivation to do it. What I did is make the code
and install scripts FreeBSD friendly so that it would be possible to compile
the game under FreeBSD. Packaging is another story.
Mac OS X¶
There's
currently a beta version of a Mac OS X port for Liquid War. Ryan D. Brown
nicely managed to compile and run the game under Mac OS X, and the latest news
was that it does basically work. Still, this port did not go through intensive
testing, so there might still be some bugs, expecially concerning
networking.
There were
some byte endianess problems in previous ( <=5.5.8 ) releases of LW, but I
tried to fix them and they should be gone now.
As of today,
we're trying to find out a convenient way to package and release the Mac OS X
version of LW. You can contact us on the mailing list if you're interested in
this port.
User levels¶
A piece of advice¶
You can use
your own levels whith Liquid War 5. The only thing you have to do is to put
your own 256-colors vbitmap files in a special directory, and the program will
use them. Currently, BMP, LBM, PCX, and TGA files are supported. It is a good
thing to use 256 colors bitmaps, for they waste less disk space than truecolor
bitmaps, and Liquid War 5 converts all bitmaps to 32 colors bitmaps.
Additionnally, truecolor bitmaps might cause the DOS version to crash
randomly... 2-color bitmaps will also cause the program to crash. I warned
you!
The best
thing you can do to create your user levels is to have a look at the few user
files I put in the .zip file and try at first to do something that looks about
the same!
Maps¶
Liquid War 5
does many checks on user levels and is much safer than Liquid War 3. Still,
try and help the program not to crash, if possible.
Liquid War
considers that dark colors are walls and bright colors are associated to the
playable area. So you can draw your walls in black, dark blue, etc... And the
rest of the map can be of any bright color such as white or yellow.
You can draw
a small map on a big bitmap, as long as you use a bright background color.
Liquid War will autodetect the range of your map and add the border line if
necessary.
Liquid War
re-orders all the maps, so that the smallest ones are on the left and the most
complicated ones on the right when you choose them with the slider in the
"map" menu. So if you can't find the map you just draw, don't worry,
it is probably just mixed with the levels from the .dat file.
The default
path for maps is "custom\map\" on windows, and
"/usr/local/share/games/liquidwar/map" on GNU/Linux.
Textures¶
All you have
to do is put a bitmap in the default directory which is
"custom\texture\" on windows, and
"/usr/local/share/games/liquidwar/texture" on GNU/Linux.
Textures¶
As of Liquid
War 5.6.x, it's possible to associate a map with a texture. All you need is to
call the maps with the same name (case is important, lowercase
recommendend...). Look at the "meditate" custom map which is shipped
with Liquid War for instance.
This also
works with internal builtin maps (those stored in the datafile) so for
instance if you name a custom texture "world1.bmp" it will
automatically be associated to the builtin map world1 (to figure out internal
names you have to unpack the source distribution and look in the ./data
directory). This also works the other way, if you name a map
"wood2.bmp" it will be automatically associated with the builtin
texture wood2.
Associating a
texture with a map requires more work than designing a simple map, but the
results is usually much nicer. See the "Kasper - ..." series of maps
for instance.
Send your levels¶
Maybe you
will find that the original levels are ugly and unplayable. Well, if you have
made user levels and think they are great, just send them to the Liquid War
user mailing list. Please use only 256 colors bitmap and zip them before
sending them, or else they might be blocked by my provider...
As of today,
dozens of user maps have already been included in Liquid War, this is very
nice for it happens that every map designer has his own personnal tastes, so
the maps all look different.
Still, to be
included in Liquid War's mainstream distribution, your maps will need to be
placed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or at least a
compatible license. You should have received a copy of this license with
Liquid War anyway. Read it 8-)
Of course,
you can use *any* map when playing. You can even play with a bitmap you got
from a proprietary source - such a proprietary game you bought for instance -
but the point is that I can't - and you can't either - distribute such a map
along with Liquid War.
However, this
is enough legal boring stuff! What you should keep in mind is that I'm always
happy when I receive maps from players, and it's a pleasure for me to include
them in the mainstream distribution.
Core algorithm¶
Introduction¶
- General remarks
If you have
played Liquid War, you must have noticed that your army always takes the
shortest way to reach the cursor. So the fundamental stuff in Liquid War is
path-finding. Once you've done that the game is quite easy to code. Not harder
than any other 2D game. Still the path finding algorithm is an interesting
one, for it's not a common method that we used.
Basically, at
each round (by round I mean a game logical update, this occurs 10 or 100
times/sec depending on the level and/or your machine), the distance from all
the points of the level to your cursor is calculated. Now the point is to
calculate this fast, real fast. In fact, a "gradient" is calculated
for all the points of the level, and the value of this gradient is the
distance required for a little pixel/fighter to reach your cursor, assuming
that he takes the shortest way. Liquid War does this with a 10% error
tolerance, and it's enough for keeping the game interesting.
Once you have
this gradient calculated, it's not hard to move your fighters. Basically, you
just have to move them toward the adjacent point that has the lowest gradient
value, ie is the closest to your cursor.
- History
The Liquid
War algorithm has been invented by my friend Thomas Colcombet In fact the
Liquid War algorithm has been invented before the game itself. The game came
as a consequence of the algorithm, he just thought "mmm, cool, we could
make a game with that!".
Later, I
enhanced the algorithm, as I coded it. The consequences were a performance
increase, especially on simple but big levels. I mean levels with wide areas
for teams to move. Still the basis of the algorithm remained the same.
- Pros
The Liquid
War algorithm for path-finding is very efficient:
- *
- When you have to move lots of different points toward one single point. Good thing that's the rule of Liquid War!
- *
- When you have no clue about how your map will look like, ie
if the walls are randomly placed. The complexity of the level doesn't
influence much the speed of the algorithm. The size does, but the
complexity, ie the number of walls, is not so important.
- Cons
The Liquid
War algorithm is very poor compared to other algorithms when:
- *
- You have several target destinations, that's to say Liquid War would be really slow if there were 100 teams with 10 players only.
- *
- You want to move one single point only.
- *
- > You want the exact (100% sure) path. In fact, this
algorithm finds solutions which approach the best one but you can never
figure out if the solution you found is the best, and the algorithm never
ends. In the long term, the algo will always find the best solution or
something really close but I don't know any easy way to figure out when
you have reached this state.
Mesh¶
- Introduction
The first
Liquid War algorithm used to calculate the gradient (the distance from a point
to your cursor) for every single point of the map.
With Liquid
War 5, I used a mesh system. This mesh system is a structure of squares
connected together. Squares may be 1,2,4,8 or 16 units large or any nice value
like that, and the gradient is only calculated once for each square. Squares
have connections between them, and each connection is associated to a
direction.
There are 12
directions:
- *
- North-North-West (NNW)
- *
- North-West (NW)
- *
- West-North-West (WNW)
- *
- West-South-West (WSW)
- *
- South-West (SW)
- *
- South-South-West (SSW)
- *
- South-South-East (SSE)
- *
- South-East (SE)
- *
- East-South-East (ESE)
- *
- East-North-East (ENE)
- *
- North-East (NE)
- *
- North-North-East (NNE)
- Example
Well, let me
give you an example, supposing that you level structure is:
**********
* *
* *
* **
* *
**********
The *
represent walls, that's to say squares where fighters can not go.
Then the mesh
structure would be:
**********
*11112233*
*11112233*
*1111445**
*i1114467*
**********
In this mesh,
there are 7 zones:
- *
- zone 1 has a size of 4. It's linked with zones 2 (ENE) and 4 (ESE).
- *
- zone 2 has a size of 2. It's linked with zones 3 (ENE,ESE), 5 (SE), 4 (SSE,SSW) and 1 (SW,WSW,WNW).
- *
- zone 3 has a size of 2. It's linked with zones 5 (SSW), 4 (SW) and 2 (WSW,WNW).
- *
- zone 4 has a size of 2. It's linked with zones 2 (NNW,NNE), 4 (NE), 5 (ENE), 6 (ESE) and 1 (WSW,WNW,NW).
- *
- zone 5 has a size of 1. It's linked with zones 3 (NNW,NNE,NE), 7 (SE), 6 (SSE,SSW), 4 (SW,WSW,WNW) and 2 (NW).
- *
- zone 6 has a size of 1. It's linked with zones 5 (NNW,NNE), 7 (ENE,ESE) and 4 (WSW,WNW,NW).
- *
- zone 7 has a size of 1. It's linked with zones 5 (NW) and 6
(WSW,WNW).
- Why such a complicated structure?
Because it
allows the module which calculates the gradient to work much faster. With this
system, the number of zones is reduced a lot, and calculus on the mesh can go
very fast. At the same time, this mesh structure is complicated to understand
by us humans but it's very easy for the computer.
Gradient¶
- Introduction
For each zone
defined in the mesh, LW calculates an estimation of the distance between the
cursor and this zone.
The algorihm
is based on the fact that to cross a zone which size is n, n movements are
required. Easy, eh?
- Description
Here's the
way the algorithm works:
for each turn
of the game, do:
- *
- pick up a direction between the 12 defined directions. They
have to be chosen is a peculiar order to avoid weird behaviors from
fighters, but let's suppose we just pick up the "next"
direction, ie if WSW was chosen the last time, we pick up WNW.
and then for
each zone in the mesh, do:
- *
- Compare the potential of the current zone with that of its neighbor zone. The neighbor zone to be chosen is the one which corresponds to the direction which has been previously picked up, and by potential I mean "the distance to the cursor, estimated by the algorithm's last pass".
- *
- If potential_of_the_neighbor_zone >
(potential_of_the_current_zone + size_of_the_current_zone) then
potentiel_of_the_neighbor_zone = potential_of_the_current_zone +
size_of_the_current_zone
- How can this work?
Well, just
ask my friend thom-Thom, he's the one who had the idea of this
algorithm!
The basic
idea is that by applying this simple rule to all the zones, after a certain
amount of time, it's impossible to find any place in the mesh where the rule
is not respected. And at this time, one can consider the potiential is right
in any point.
Of course
when the cursor moves the potential has to be recalculated, but you see,
cursors move really slowly in Liquid War, so the algorithm has plenty of time
to find a new stable solution...
- Demo
It's possible
to see this algorithm working by typing:
ufootgrad[n]
while
playing, where [n] is the number of the team the gradient of which you want to
view. The game is still running but you view a team's gradient being
calculated in real time instead of seeing the fighters.
If you type
ufootgrad0 the display comes back to normal mode.
Move¶
- Introduction
Once the
gradient is calculated for any zone on the battlefield, it's quite easy to
move the fighters, hey?
The following
method is used to move the players:
- *
- A "main direction" is chosen for the fighter, this direction is chosen using the gradient calculated on the mesh.
- *
- Knowing which direction is the main one, a "level of
interest" is applied to the 12 defined directions.
There are 4
"level of interest" for directions:
- *
- Main directions: the direction calculated.
- *
- Good directions: these directions should lead the fighter to the cursor.
- *
- Acceptable directions: ok, one can use this direction, since the fighter shouldn't loose any time using it.
- *
- Unpossible directions: wether there's a wall or using this
direction means the fighter will be farer from his cursor than before, it
always means that this direction will not be used, never.
- Rules
The fighters
will try to find any matching situation in this list, and chose the first
one.
- *
- The main direction is available, no one on it, OK, let's follow it.
- *
- There's a good direction with no one on it, OK, let's follow it.
- *
- There's an acceptable direction with no one on it, OK, let's follow it.
- *
- The main direction is available, but there's an opponent on it, I attack! By attacking, one means that energy is drawned from the attacked fighter and transmitted to the attacker. When the attacked fighter dies, he belongs to the team which killed him.
- *
- A good direction is available, but there's an opponent on it, I attack!
- *
- The main direction is available, but there's a mate on it, I cure him. That's to say that energy is given to the mate. This way, when there's a big pool of fighters from the same team, they re-generate each other.
- *
- None of the previous situations found, do nothing.
- Tips and tricks
The behavior
of the armies is quite tricky to set up. I had myself to try many algorithms
before I came to something nice. In fact, I had to introduce some
"random" behaviors. They are not really random for I wanted the game
to behave the same when given the same keyboard input, but for instance,
fighters will prefer NNW to NNE sometimes, and NNE to NNW some other times. By
the way, I think Liquid War could stand as a nice example of the thoery of
chaos.
Source code¶
General remarks¶
- Modularity
Liquid War 5
is basically a big C program. I've splitted the source code in many small
files for I do not like to have to handle big monolithic sources, but this
does not mean Liquid War is very modular. In fact Liquid War 5 is quite
bloated with global variables and other ugly stuff 8-(
- Coding style
To be honest,
it's a big mess. You won't find 2 files coded in the same maner... OK, I'm
exagerating a bit. From now I try to make an effort and stick to basic rules
such as:
- *
- use the GNUish-style indentation - the default Emacs mode in fact
- *
- prefix global functions / variables / constants / types with lw_<NAME_OF_THE_file>_. For instance, a "do_it" function in myfile.c will be called lw_myfile_do_it
- *
- use capitals for constants, globals and types only. All functions are in lowercase with "_" to separate words
- *
- keep on using 8.3 filenames for .c source files. This is for better DOS integration. DOS version of Liquid War is still maintained, you know 8-)
- *
- use English only for code and comments
I might
decide to rename and cleanup everything some day, for it would help other
coders to understand what I wrote, but well, this is certainly not a thrilling
task 8-/
Source files organization¶
- Main game code
Here you'll
find the main() function, the main game loop, application-wide constants and
other global stuff.
It might be a
good start if you want to hack the code.
- *
- base.h: contains global constants used in many different files.
- *
- game.c / game.h: contains the main game loop.
- *
- main.c / main.h: the file where the main C function is
declared. Doesn't contain much except calling init functions and running
the GUI.
- Menus
The menus are
coded using the Allegro GUI system. While this system is very powerfull, it's
IMHO not adapted to very complex GUIs, and one of its drawbacks is that it's
not so easy to redesign something once you've coded it.
Besides, when
I started coding the GUI in 1998, I did it in a rather ugly way, and now I'm
paying for my being lazy at that time, since I spent hours coding when I want
to change something 8-/
- *
- about.c / about.h: contains the code for the about menu.
- *
- advanced.c / advanced.h: contains the GUI advanced options menu.
- *
- connect.c / connect.h: contains code for the "connect" menu which displays which players are connected to the server, before the game actually starts.
- *
- controls.c / controls.h: contains the code for the controls menu.
- *
- graphics.c / graphics.h: code for the graphic options menu.
- *
- internet.c / internet.h: contains the code for the "Search for Internet games" menu, where one can pick up a running server automatically with the help of the meta-server.
- *
- language.c / language.h: contains the code for the "Language" menu.
- *
- level.c / level.h: contains code for the menu where the player can select a level and its options (texture or color).
- *
- menu.c / menu.h: contains the code for the main menu.
- *
- netgame.c / netgame.h: contains the code for the net game menu.
- *
- options.c / options.h: contains the code for the options menu.
- *
- play.c / play.h: contains the code which ties the menu to the main gameloop.
- *
- rules.c / rules.h: code for the rules menu.
- *
- score.c / score.h: functions to display the scores at the end of the game.
- *
- speeds.c / speeds.h: contains the code for the speeds menu.
- *
- team.c / team.h: code for the team menu, where one choses which teams will play.
- *
- volume.c / volume.h: code for the sound menu.
- *
- wave.c / wave.h: code for the wave menu.
- GUI tools
These files
contain various utilities which are used in the menus.
- *
- alleg2.c / alleg2.h: contains some tweaked allegro functions. I wanted to use bitmaps with sevral colors for my fonts, and change some of the allegro default behavior. So rather than modifying the allegro source code right in the library I copied it in this file and then modified it.
- *
- back.c / back.h: this modules displays the background image.
- *
- dialog.c / dialog.h: contains code for standard dialog boxes.
- *
- error.c / error.h: contains functions to display error messages once the game is in graphical mode.
- *
- help.c / help.h: generic functions to display the various
help pages.
- Core algorithm
Here's *the*
interesting part. All the rest of the code is just sugar coat to display
stuff, receive players commands, communicate with other computers, handle
errors, etc... But the real thing is here!
It's funny to
note that these files have almost not been modified since Liquid War
5.0.
It's also
interesting to note that they represent a small percentage of the total amount
of code in the game. This tends to prove - and I'm convinced of it - that game
programming does not only consists in having great ideas, but also requires a
lot of "dirty" and boring work. Honestly, coding an option menu is
as boring as coding Liquid War algorithm is fun.
- *
- fighter.c / fighter.h: contains code to move the armies, once the gradient has been calculated.
- *
- grad.c / grad.h: this module calculates the gradient for each team. One could say it's the "kernel" of the game, since most of the CPU time is spent in this module (except if you have a slow display...).
- *
- mesh.c / mesh.h: contains code to set up a usable mesh with a map. Mesh are re-calculated at each time a new game is started, the reason for this being that meshes are *very* big so it would not be reasonnable to save them directly on the HD.
- *
- monster.s / monster.h: assembly functions to speed-up the game. It's a replacement for some fighter.c functions.
- *
- spread.s / spread.h: contains assembly replacements for
some functions of grad.c. These replacements do the same than the original
ones from grad.c, but faster. Could still be optimized.
- Moving cursors
It looks like
nothing, but moving a cursor and deciding where it should go if there's a wall
in front of it is not that easy, especially if you want things to work
nicely.
- *
- autoplay.c / autoplay.h: contains the code for the computer AI. This module simulates keypresses from the computer, then the computer is handled as any other player.
- *
- move.c / move.h: provides an API to move the cursors.
- User input
Until 5.4.0,
Liquid War did not have network support. As it is designed to be multiplayer,
one needed to have several players on the same computer. The mouse also needed
to be handled in a special way since cursors can *not* pass walls in Liquid
War. Additionnally, I wanted all input channels (keyboard mouse and joystick)
to be handled in a unified way.
This explains
why there's so much code for user input, when one would think at first sight
that "polling the keyboard is enough".
- *
- joystick.c / joystick.h: contains code to support joystick input. It wraps joystick buttons to virtual keyboard keys, so that joystick and keyboard behave exactly the same.
- *
- keyboard.c / keyboard.h: contains code to handle key presses.
- *
- mouse.c / mouse.h: wraps the mouse movements to virtual
keyboard keys. This way the mouse can be used to control the players.
- Initialisations
These files
contain functions to intialize various game components. 100% boring
code.
- *
- area.c / area.h: contains functions to create the game area. Basically it contains functions to create the data structures in which the level is stored during the game.
- *
- army.c / army.h: functions to create the armies, and place them on the battlefield.
- *
- asm.c / asm.h: various constants, macros and utilities to ensure that asembly code works correctly.
- *
- bigdata.c / bigdata.h: I had a really hard time with the malloc function with DJGPP under Win95 dos box. I tried to have it working for hours and hours but my program kept being buggy. So I decided to allocate the memory myself, in a memory zone I create at startup. This is what this module does: create a huge memory zone and then give parts of it to the rest of the program.
- *
- config.c / config.h: contains everything that is related to the game configuration. This module contains in global variables all the parameters that are stored in the config file.
- *
- cursor.c / cursor.h: contains the code to init the cursors and place them on the battlefield at the beginning of the game.
- *
- decal.c / decal.h: This module makes the link between teams and players. Its coding is quite ugly, for some modules in LW assume that when 2 teams are playing they are always teams 0 and 1. So when 3 teams are playing are playing and the second team loses, one has to make team 2 become team 1. That's what this module is for.
- *
- exit.c / exit.h: contains code that is executed when the game ends, it shuts down Allegro and displays messages on the console.
- *
- gfxmode.c / gfxmode.h: contains code to set up the various video modes, and defines which modes are available for each platform.
- *
- init.c / init.h: contains code to initialize Allegro with proper options and analyze failures.
- *
- palette.c / palette.h: contains function to set up the
current color palette. Liquid War uses different palettes, depending on
what colors are chosen for teams.
- Graphics
Here lies
most of the graphic functions in Liquid War. There's not that much code since
Liquid War's strength is not its visual effects, but rather its
gameplay.
The only
"funny" thing is the wave effect. I'm quite happy with it, and
honestly, I do think it is rather fast, given the fact that it uses no 3D
hardware at all.
- *
- disp.c / disp.h: contains functions to display the battlefield.
- *
- distor.c / distor.h: this module contains code to create the "wave effect". It uses a lot of data tables, and is quite complicated to understand...
- *
- glouglou.s / glouglou.h: assembly module, it is a replacement for some functions of distor.c. It goes much faster but does the same.
- *
- info.c / info.h: contains code to display the info bar. The info bar is the bar which display the time left and the amount of players for each team while the game is running.
- *
- message.c / message.h: provides an API to display messages during the game. Very useful if you want to debug the game: you can trace and display anything.
- *
- pion.c / pion.h: contains code to display the cursors.
- *
- viewport.c / vieport.h: code to allocate and resize the
zone where the map is displayed, also called "viewport".
- Sound and music
Sound and
music routines required some encapsulation, since the game must be able to run
even if the sound and/or music did not load correctly.
- *
- music.c / music.h: contains the code to control MIDI playback.
- *
- sound.c / sound.h: functions to play sound.
- Data management
These
functions handle the datafile contents and also the custom data.
Note that the
various utilities such as liquidwarcol, liquidwarmap and liquidwartex do not
share code with the main executable. This is obviously a design error, for
liquidwarmap will handle maps in a very poor way and is unable to autodetect
map errors, whereas the game does it rather well. Blame the programmer.
- *
- disk.c / disk.h: contains all the code to access data from the hard drive. In fact, all the HD access is done at startup.
- *
- map.c / map.h: contains code to load the maps from a datafile raw data or a user defined bitmap to a usable structure in RAM.
- *
- maptex.c / maptex.h: contains code to handle the "use default texture" option, and associate a map with a given texture automatically.
- *
- texture.c / texture.h: contains code to handle textures.
Textures are stored in a special format which uses 5 bits per pixel.
- Random map generator
Liquid War
has a "generate random map" feature which is available within the
game and also as an external program. The source code for the external program
is in ./utils/lwmapgen in Liquid War source distribution. This program has
been coded by David Redick, is also available on
http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~dredick/lwmapgen/ and works on GNU/Linux. Compiling
this program under DOS and/or Windows is untested and unsupported.
The random
map generator within Liquid War - which of course works on any platform
support by LW - uses for its greater part the same source code as the external
lwmapgen program.
- *
- random.c / random.h: wrapper for the map generator written
by David Redick. It basically does the same as ./utils/lwmapgen/main.c
except that it does it within Liquid War as it is running and not in an
external independant program.
- Time handling
Time handling
is fundamental in a game. Time is used for visual effects (waves...) during
the game, it's used to generate some pseudo random stuff, well, it's used
everywhere!
Note that on
the client, I use 2 "different" clocks. The first counts the
"real" time, in seconds. The second one is counts "rounds"
and is incremented by 1 at each game round.
- *
- srvtime.c / srvtime.h: code used to handle time on the server, where Allegro's functions are not available.
- *
- ticker.c / ticker.h: sets up a timer callback.
- *
- time.c / time.h: functions to know how long the game has
been running, knowing that it can be interrupted.
- In-game utilities
These are
various utilities use to monitor and control the game while one's
playing.
- *
- capture.c / capture.h: code used to capture the video output of the game and store it in .bmp files while playing.
- *
- checksum.c / checksum.h: utilities to generate a checksum from a given game state. Used in network code to make sure all the clients stay synchronized.
- *
- code.c / code.h: This file contains the code to handle key presses during the game. That's to say the pause key for instance.
- *
- profile.c / profile.h: provides tools to calculate how fast the game is runnning and what operations slow it down.
- *
- watchdog.c / watchdog.h: this module waits for "secret
codes" to be typed while the game is running, and traps them.
- Command line handling
OK, now to
all the UNIX guys, I *know* there are many ways to do things in a better and
simple way than I did. But keep in mind that in 1998, under DOS, I had a
rotten command line and even now I need everything to work on both UNIX and
Microsoft platforms.
These
utilities are not perfect, but they work, that's all I ask them.
- *
- basicopt.c / basicopt.h: handles basic command line parameters such as "-v" or "-h".
- *
- parser.c / parser.h: contains code to parse and analyze the command line parameters.
- *
- startup.c / startup.h: analyzes the command line parameters
and stores them into global variables.
- Locale support
Liquid War
now has locale support. Basically, all the labels and texts in the UI are
stored in constants. There's simply file per language.
Note to
translators: if you decide to translate the menus in another language, keep in
mind that all the translations must fit in the various buttons and textboxes.
The best resolution to test this - the one where letters take most place - is
640x480.
- *
- lang.c / lang.h: contains code to handle language dependant stuff.
- *
- langen.c / langen.h: contains code to handle English specific stuff.
- *
- langfr.c / langfr.h: contains code to handle French
specific stuff.
- Log and various messages
OK, the API
of the log routines is a piece of crap. Now I'm simply too lazy to change it.
It works, that's all I ask.
BTW, there's
a clear advantage in using custom-made log functions instead of plain calls to
"fprintf(stderr,...". It might not be obvious for UNIX users, but
think about Windows. Nothing like a "tail -f" there, nor a proper
output redirection system. When a user clicks on the Liquid War icon, I want
"console" information to be logged in a file!
- *
- log.h: common header for logcli.c and logsrv.c.
- *
- logcli.c: contains code to display messages on the console. It's usefull for console may have different behaviors when the games is used on different platforms. This file is used to compile the client.
- *
- logsrv.c: contains code to display messages on the console. This file is used to compile the server, which does not use Allegro at all.
- *
- popupgen.h: common header for popup functions.
- *
- popupw32.c: code to handle popup on the Win32 platform.
Popups are a must-have under Windows for error diagnostics, since the
average Windows user never gives any look at any log file...
- Macros, utilities and string support
As usual, I
needed to prepare a small set of usefull macros.
- *
- macro.h: contains basic wrappers/macros for snprintf like functions. This mostly to ease up string manipulation which is - as always - a nightmare in standard C.
- *
- path.c / path.h: code used to handle filenames and paths,
for instance remove path and file extension from a filename.
It's also
important to note that Liquid War uses snprintf instead of sprintf, for using
the latter is very likely to cause buffer overflows. Under Linux glibc
provides this function but Microsoft does not provide it natively on Windows.
Therefore I used a third party snprintf implementation by Mark Martinec:
http://www.ijs.si/software/snprintf/ and its source is available in the
./utils directory of Liquid War source distribution.
- Byte order and endianess
As you might
know, PC Intel based computers are "little-endian" while Sun Sparc
stations and Mac computers are "big-endian". This is an issue for LW
since in network games maps are transmitted in binary format. Therefore I
needed to set up some (un)serialization fonctions.
- *
- serial.c / serial.h: code used to transform integers and
map headers into an uniform cross-platform byte stream which is readable
by both little and big endian machines.
- Thread support
Liquid War
does have thread support, but it is a "limited" thread support. I
mean that the game is generally monothreaded, but a few functions use threads.
For instance, calls to the meta-server are done within threads.
Basically, I
do not really enjoy programming in a multithreaded environnement. So when
possible, I chose the monothread path, and used threads only where I simply
would not be able to find another acceptable solution.
I also needed
to use some mutexes to prevent crashes in the user interface.
- *
- mutxdos.c: provides fake mutex support under DOS. This module is here only to make compilation easier.
- *
- mutxgen.h: header for mutxdos.c, mutxunix.c and mutxw32.c.
- *
- mutxunix.c: provides mutex support on UNIX.
- *
- mutxw32.c: provides mutex support on Win32.
- *
- thrddos.c: provides fake thread support under DOS. This module is here only to make compilation easier.
- *
- thrdgen.h: header for thrddos.c, thrdunix.c and thrdw32.c.
- *
- thrdunix.c: provides thread support on UNIX.
- *
- thrdw32.c: provides thread support on Win32.
- Launching external programs
Liquid War
might sometimes launch external programs. This is (for security reason) not a
default behavior and has to be activated and configured by yourself, using the
"-callback" command line option on the server for instance.
- *
- execgen.h: header for execunix.c and execw32.c.
- *
- execunix.c: code to launch external programs on UNIX.
- *
- execw32.c: code to launch external programs on Win32.
- *
- exec2.c: code to launch external programs within the
client, without any interaction with the user, ie no unwanted popping
window for instance.
- Low-level network code
There are
network packages for Allegro, but I decided not to use them. Socket support is
not that hard to implement under UNIX and Win32 and besides, I've done it for
my job recently, so I just knew how to do it.
Another
reason which decided me to code my own toolbox is that I did not want Liquid
War to have external dependencies - except Allegro of course. This way, UNIX
gamers to not have to set up and/or download a specific network library. It's
also easier to integrate the game in projects like Debian if it has few
dependencies.
This network
code is not a masterpiece, it's just a little set of tools that have proven to
work. That's all.
BTW, it's
important to notice that when linking with Allegro, most blocking UNIX calls
("sleep" or "recv" for instance) stop working: they
alwasys return immediately. This led me to implement weird ugly hacks, like
calling "recv" in a loop until it gets what it wants... This is
theorically and practically a performance killer, but I found no other way to
fix this. And FYI, this is not an Allegro bug, it's a feature 8-)
- *
- dnsutil.c / dnsutil.h: wrapper code to issue DNS requests, without having to handle the hostent struct.
- *
- sock2cli.c: sode used to wrap low-level network function on the client.
- *
- sock2gen.h: header for sock2cli.c and sock2srv.c.
- *
- sock2srv.c: code used to wrap low-level network function on the server.
- *
- sockdos.c: network API for DOS.
- *
- sockex.c: netowrk routines shared by sockunix and sockw32.
- *
- sockgen.h: header for sockdos.c, sockunix.c and sockw32.c.
- *
- sockunix.c: network API for UNIX.
- *
- sockw32.c: network API for Win32.
- High-level network code
These files
contains network utilities which are Liquid War specific.
- *
- chat.c / chat.h: functions used to handle chat messages in network games.
- *
- keyexch.c / keyexch.h: functions to send and receive keys to the server. Used on the client.
- *
- netconf.c / netconf.h: code to send and receive the config of the clients over the network.
- *
- netkey.c / netkey.h: contains some tools to manipulate key strokes over the network.
- *
- netmap.c / netmap.h: code to send and receive the maps over the network.
- *
- netmess.c / netmess.h: contains a parser to interpret plain text messages. Used when exhanging information over the network.
- *
- netplay.c / netplay.h: contains the code to set up and start network games.
- *
- network.c / network.h: contains some network related functions and constants used on the client.
- *
- ping.c / ping.h: code used on the client to estimate the average ping time with a server.
- *
- protocol.c / protocol.h: contains the sequence of messages send and recevied by the client when connecting on the server.
- *
- startinf.c / startinf.h: contains struct and tools to
handle some network informations while starting a network game.
- Communication with the meta-server
The
meta-server is called by both client and server. Basically, the server
registers itself, and the client asks for a list of servers.
The
meta-server itself is just a set of simple PHP scripts with a simple MySQL
database. I chose PHP because my provider allows execution of PHP pages,
that's all.
The protocol
is *very* basic, and uses HTTP 1.0 for requests. Answers are received in plain
text, with one information per line. There's no garantee that this would work
with any HTTP server, but experience proved that it works with my provider
8-)
- *
- httputil.c / httputil.h: low level functions to handle http requests.
- *
- wwwcli.c / wwwcli.h: code used on the client to communicate with the meta-server.
- *
- wwwsrv.c / wwwsrv.h: code used on the server to communicate
with the meta-server.
- Server code
The Liquid
War server is a rather small program. The only thing it does is accept new
players, transmit map and game parameters between them, and then
"replicate keys".
By
"replicate keys" I mean that the server asks each client what keys
have been pressed during the last round, and then dispatches this informations
to all clients. This implies that the server has absolutely no idea of who's
loosing, who's winning, etc...
All the
"logic" of the server is coded in these files, the rest is only
utilities and helper functions.
- *
- server.c / server.h: main code for the server (equivalent of main.c for the client).
- *
- srvchan.c / srvchan.h: code used to handles channels on the server. A channel is associated to a given computer and may manage several teams.
- *
- srvcont.c / srvcont.h: global network controler used on the server.
- *
- srvteam.c / srvteam.h: code used to handle teams on the
server.
Bugs¶
Report a new bug¶
If you have
troubles with Liquid War 5, if you think it is a bug, and if it is not
described in this file, then just send a (precise...) decription of your
problem to the Liquid War user mailing list.
Besides, it
happens that now most bug reports come from the Debian tracking system
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=liquidwar". Thanks
to the Debian users and maintainers, it's a very valuable feedback
source.
Additionnaly,
on online bug tracking system has been set up. It uses Flyspray
http://flyspray.rocks.cc/. It's accessible on http://www.ufoot.org/bugtracker/
or "http://www.ufoot.org/bugtracker/index.php?project=2". I try to
collect everything here : bugs reported on the mailing-list, bugs from Debian,
and bugs I found myself. Alternatively you can report bugs directly on it 8-)
Network¶
Network
support in Liquid War is far from being perfect, so there are a bunch of
little problems which can appear. Basically, once the game is correctly
started on a LAN, you should have no problems, but getting the game started
might be difficult.
Mouse does not work¶
Some users
reported that they were unable to control the Liquid War cursor with the
mouse. Well, the answer is a typical Microsoftish "this ain't a bug, it's
a feature!".
More
seriously, you're supposed to move the cursor with the keyboard in Liquid War.
There's no way to handle the cursor "like a mouse pointer" (*). This
is due to:
- *
- Severe limitations in the Liquid War core algorithm.
- *
- The fact that moving the cursor "too fast" would
really change the gameplay of Liquid War. As a Liquid War integrist 8-) I
can tell you the game would really not be the same if you could move the
cursor as fast as you wish. It's part of the game that sometimes it takes
you ages to recover from a strategical mistakes. You need to think twice
before going to the very end of a level. That's strategy. At least that's
how I view things... Anyways as I mentionned above there's a limitation in
the core algorithm.
(*) This is
not perfectly true, there's a way to control the cursor with the mouse, but
it's designed for the case "4 people want to play on the same computer
and one single keyboard is not enough". Controlling the cursor with the
mouse in Liquid War is possible but yet rather hard to master 8-/ Try it and
you'll understand what I mean. This mode can be set up in the
"Teams" menu.
Game does not start¶
On non UNIX
platforms such as Windows or DOS, Liquid War is distributed in a .zip file.
It's IMPORTANT that you unzip the .zip files with an "unzipper"
which preserves the directory structure. Most install problems under Windows
come from broken unzipping programs which extract all files in the same
directory... WinZip 8.x or the unzip32.exe utility that comes with DJGPP are
both able to uncompress Liquid War .zip files correctly.
On Liquid War
5.5.9 and later, the Windows version should detect this problem automatically
and warn you with a message which basically says something like "Unable
to load datafile. Are you sure Liquid War is correctly installed?". If
you get this message, you need to reinstall the game by unzipping it with a
"correct" unzipping program which does not wreck directory
structrure up.
Interference with other Windows programs¶
It's been
reported that Liquid War can run very slowly on Windows when some other
programs (Mozilla for instance) are running. So if Liquid War's menus seem to
be really really slow, then try to shut down other applications and run the
game again.
This problem
does not seem to apply on GNU/Linux - at least if you do not run 300 daemons
together on your machine 8-)
Datafile bugs¶
Sometimes
there are some problems when compiling the datafile, this includes:
- *
- The liquidwarcol, liquidwarmap and liquidwartex utilities might freeze or segfault. Typing "make" again often solves the problem.
- *
- The background image sometimes ends up using the wrong
palette, which has a very nasty consequence: it looks ugly.
These bugs
are quite hard to get rid off, since I can not reproduce them easily. The good
solution would be to completely rewrite the liquidwarcol, liquidwarmap and
liquidwartex utilities.
Midi does not work on OSS¶
- Preamble
IF your midi
music on Liquid War, or indeed any other Allegro game, doesn't work and you
are using the OSS (Open Sound System) drivers (these are the sound drivers
which come with the standard kernel distribution), this may well be because
Allegro only supports "FM synthesis" and not "wavetable"
when it is using OSS. FM synthesis is a very old method of making sound from
MIDI and has long since been replaced by wavetable synthesis, with the net
result that it's quite possible you've got OSS MIDI working nicely in other
applications without having FM support set up at all. This is what I found.
(It has to be said that I didn't find the FM sound quality quite as bad as
people have said, though).
In this
situation, it looks to me like you have the following choices:
- Hack Allegro...
and for the
rest of us...
- Use Allegro's DIGMID midi driver...
- Get an FM driver up and running...
- *
- Find out which FM driver is appropriate for your sound card. If you have distribution-specific tools and docs for setting up sound, try those. If not, you will need to be familiar with the knowledge in the Sound-HOWTO and Kernel-HOWTO i.e. know how to compile kernels and modules and deal with sound drivers.
- *
- Look through the OSS modules in 'make menuconfig' and see if anything catches your eye. See if there is any specific documentation on your sound card on http://www.linuxdoc.org. Do a few web searches. For my AWE64, I use the OPL3 driver.
- *
- Compile and install the FM driver module, or set up your system to use the new kernel if you want to compile the driver in.
- *
- Load the module, or boot your new kernel. It is very important that you pay attention to what is said in the 'help' for your FM driver in 'make menuconfig' and read any necessary files in the Documentation/sound/ directory. For example, I just had a nice half-hour wondering why the hell my FM wasn't working now when it had been before - with the OPL3 driver, you have to give the option io=0x388 to insmod. Which is stated nice and clear in the docs, but of course I had forgotten since then. You can prevent such happenings by recording options permanently in /etc/modules.conf - see the manpage etc.
- *
- Try the game. If it's worked you will hear particularly
beepy music. Enjoy!
- Opl3 occult FAQ
--IMPORTANT--
If you are using Liquid War, your FM will only work if you go to the map
'Elephant inside a boa' and proceed to chase each other round in circles for
at least 10 minutes. This cures a bug in the design of the OPL3 interface
which conflicts badly with the core Liquid War algorithms. How the hell the
music hardware even knows about the core algorithms I don't know, but that's
what I made of the now-defunct opl3-occult-FAQ, from which here is an
excerpt:
Many roads a
man must take. Those with one-track minds are DOOMED, I tells ya.
---- The
Liquid War algorithm calculates distances to one place, the cursor.
And:
Man or
machine, face or code, must stand strong and solid; must not just ooze away as
slime.
---- We think
it might just take objection to the whole 'slimy' nature of the LW beings. As
well as it being LIQUID War.
So, our
carefully tailored approach, is to firstly have the players going in all the
possible different directions evenly by moving around the map in circles, and
secondly to divert the opl3's attention from the general slimy liquidness of
it all by emphasizing the solidity, reality, and natural goodness of that
classic tapestry: an elephant inside a boa.
That and it's
a f***ing ace level.
Checksum errors¶
The Liquid
War server is a "light" servers which - to some extent - has no idea
about what is going on in the game. It simply replicates key strokes between
clients and each client maintains its own game state. Normally, the game is
designed so that given the same user input, it will behave exactly the
same.
However, it
happens that sometimes 2 clients can behave differently, and this is a
(severe) bug. One consequence is that messages reporting "Checksum
errors" appear on the server's and on the client's console output. This
bug appears when using non-default rules settings. Basically, if someones
tweaks his rules, then the checksum errors appear. Of course I double-triple
checked that options were correctly sent on the network, but, well, could not
fix the bug. Yet. The short term solution seems to play with default factory
settings...
I'm highly
interested in bug-reports concerning this problem.
To do¶
Bug-fixing¶
In its latest
releases Liquid War is quite stable IMHO. However there are still some issues
with network under Windows for instance. I'm aware of these bugs and I'm
trying to fix them but this does really take time.
I always
welcome bug-reports and patches, as making Liquid War W 5.x.x as stable and
bug-free as possible is really important to me - and most of the time players
also appreciate stable programs 8-)
The most
important bug-fixing area is probably cross-platform support. That is, make
sure that the game runs fine on every supported OS. For instance, it's quite
common for Mac OS/X and/or FreeBSD users to "crash" the game. This
rarely happens on GNU/Linux, just because it has been so much more tested on
this platform. This applies to Liquid War itself and also, to some extent, to
Allegro.
New features¶
Let's be
clear: no new features in Liquid War 5. It's bloated, complicated, old,
uninteresting to hack. All new features should be found in Liquid War 6.
Liquid War 6¶
Since summer
2005, Liquid War 6, a complete rewrite of Liquid War, is on its way. See
http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/ or http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v6
for more informations.
Work in progress¶
Note on releases¶
Whenever
Liquid War is released, I usually pass the good news to Freshmeat (
http://freshmeat.net/projects/liquidwar/ ). Then all releases are accessible
from the main download page, which is
http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5/download.
Releasing the
game takes time, for I want all binaries to install properly and sources to
compile cleanly. Therefore there might be some delay before the time coding is
over and the time a release is actually ready. So for impatients and/or for
people who need to test out the very latest versions (eg someone who wants to
compile the game on a new platform), it's possible to access the source
repository directly.
About GNU Arch¶
I use GNU
Arch (Tom Lord's Arch in fact, http://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/ ) instead
of the previously used CVS. Indeed, tla has some very fancy features such as
signing patches with gpg, and I'm tired of suffering CVS limitations.
So FYI the
previously active CVS repositories, on Sourceforge and Savannah, are currently
unmaintained.
How to get latest releases¶
- *
- Step 1: read the excellent Arch tutorial http://regexps.srparish.net/www/tutorial/html/arch.html if you are not familiar with tla. I admit there's a steep learning curve, but it's yet clear and understandable.
- *
- Step 2: point on the repository, which is accessible
(read-only) on http://arch.sv.gnu.org/archives/liquidwar/.
A typical set
of tla commands would be:
tla
register-archive http://arch.sv.gnu.org/archives/liquidwar
tla get -A liquidwar@sv.gnu.org liquidwar6--stable
If you are
interested, I can open this repository in read/write mode, however one of the
points of GNU Arch is that it allows cooperative developpement with multiple
depots, so this isn't mandatory. And anyways, importing myself patches
received by email has never been a real burden.
Besides, most
developpement is now done on Liquid War 6. See
http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/ or http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v6
for more informations.
Copying¶
Liquid War is
a multiplayer wargame.
Copyright (C)
1998-2007 Christian Mauduit (ufoot@ufoot.org)
This program
is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation;
either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program
is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY;
without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
partICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should
have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this
program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St,
Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
AUTHOR¶
Christian Mauduit <ufoot@ufoot.org>v5.6.4 |