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liquidwar platforms
Guest on 17th August 2022 02:09:46 PM


  1. Liquid War (v5.6.4) - Platform specific issues
  2.  
  3.  
  4.  
  5.  
  6. General remarks
  7. ===============
  8.  
  9.  
  10.   Liquid War is now a cross-platform game, thanks to Allegro. So now you can
  11.   play under different OS.
  12.  
  13.   The same source tree will compile on all supported platforms, but with slight
  14.   differences when running. C preprocessor #defines are used to code some
  15.   platform specific stuff, and in some cases there are different files for the
  16.   DOS, Windows and UNIX versions.
  17.  
  18.   As I said, I try to use the same code for all platforms. This is in the long
  19.   term the best choice. Otherwise there would different branches of the source
  20.   tree, and I don't think this is a very good solution.
  21.  
  22.   Therefore some optimizations that were performed in the old DOS-only version
  23.   have been totally removed, for they were 100% platform dependent (ie mode-X
  24.   asm coding). So the new versions are all a little slower than the old 5.1
  25.   stuff, but the performance loss is only about 20%, which is not significant
  26.   with today's PCs. And anyways the performance loss is most of the time
  27.   limited to the goog old VGA 320x200x8 mode-X, which starts being kind of
  28.   obsolete.
  29.  
  30.  
  31.  
  32. DOS
  33. ===
  34.  
  35.  
  36.   This is the original version. It's the fastest one as far as I know, the
  37.   safest one and it will always be I think, since Allegro was first designed
  38.   for DOS, and DOS allows a full unconditionnal access to all the hardware
  39.   ressources LW requires. LW doesn't use any hardware acceleration and it's not
  40.   been designed to do so. Unfortunately there's no network support for the DOS
  41.   version of Liquid War.
  42.  
  43.  
  44.  
  45. Windows
  46. =======
  47.  
  48.  
  49.   When running under a Windows box, the DOS release used to be safer than the
  50.   native Windows port. Now that DOS support is getting really poor with recent
  51.   versions of Windows, the native Windows release of Liquid War starts begin
  52.   the good choice for Windows users. And Allegro for Windows is getting quite
  53.   stable in the 4.x series.
  54.  
  55.   The other reason to choose this release rather than the DOS release is that
  56.   it has network support.
  57.  
  58.   If you have problems running Liquid War under Windows, please check out the
  59.   "data\lwwin.log" file which should be written each time you run the game. It
  60.   contains the information which is displayed on the console under other
  61.   platforms, and might give you a clue about what's going wrong.
  62.  
  63.  
  64.  
  65. GNU/Linux
  66. =========
  67.  
  68.  
  69.   This port is the most recent one, and also the one I prefer. Paths have been
  70.   changed to an UNIXish style, ie the data is stored in:
  71.  
  72.   /usr/local/share/games/liquidwar
  73.  
  74.   the executable in:
  75.  
  76.   /usr/local/games
  77.  
  78.   and the configuration file is
  79.  
  80.   ~/.liquidwarrc
  81.  
  82.   Since not all GNU/Linux distributions have /usr/local/games in their path, I
  83.   also put a symbolic link to the binaries in /usr/local/bin. I believe Liquid
  84.   War is quite FHS compliant, so if its default directories do not match your
  85.   configuration, blame your distro for not following the standards 8-) AFAIK
  86.   the only touchy directory is /usr/local/share/pixmaps which I've seen on many
  87.   distribution but does not seem to be referenced in the FHS.
  88.  
  89.   With the latest releases of Allegro, Liquid War is becoming pretty stable
  90.   under GNU/Linux. You should also know that the GNU/Linux port is usually the
  91.   most up to date, since I very very seldom boot Windows at home and do most of
  92.   the coding under GNU/Linux.
  93.  
  94.  
  95.  
  96. FreeBSD
  97. =======
  98.  
  99.  
  100.   This is the latest port, so I expect it to be a little touchy to install
  101.   and/or run for some time.
  102.  
  103.   Note that to compile the game you'll need to install GNU tools like gmake and
  104.   gcc. Liquid War won't compile with the genuine make and cc commands.
  105.  
  106.   One thing you might ask is: "why do you provide the binary as a plain .tgz
  107.   file, it would be much nicer if a standard FreeBSD port was provided
  108.   instead!". The answer is that the statically linked binary should work
  109.   flawlessly and does not raise any dependency problem. Also I don't know how
  110.   to make a BSD port and I'm not really interested in doing it. If it's easy to
  111.   do, then someone can simply do it and send it back to me. If it's hard to do,
  112.   then I do not really have the time nor motivation to do it. What I did is
  113.   make the code and install scripts FreeBSD friendly so that it would be
  114.   possible to compile the game under FreeBSD. Packaging is another story.
  115.  
  116.  
  117.  
  118. Mac OS X
  119. ========
  120.  
  121.  
  122.   There's currently a beta version of a Mac OS X port for Liquid War. Ryan D.
  123.   Brown nicely managed to compile and run the game under Mac OS X, and the
  124.   latest news was that it does basically work. Still, this port did not go
  125.   through intensive testing, so there might still be some bugs, expecially
  126.   concerning networking.
  127.  
  128.   There were some byte endianess problems in previous ( <=5.5.8 ) releases of
  129.   LW, but I tried to fix them and they should be gone now.
  130.  
  131.   As of today, we're trying to find out a convenient way to package and release
  132.   the Mac OS X version of LW. You can contact us on the mailing list if you're
  133.   interested in this port.
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