     [file version.texi not included]

This file documents Heroes, a Nibbles clone, just better.

Copyright 2000, 2001  Alexandre Duret-Lutz

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the sections entitled ``Copying'' and ``GNU General Public License'' are included exactly as in the original, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Free Software Foundation.

Heroes
******

This document describes Heroes, a Nibbles clone, just better.

This document applies to Heroes version VERSION.

Heroes Copying Conditions
*************************

Heroes is "free"; this means that everyone is free to use it and free to redistribute it on a free basis.  Heroes is not in the public domain; it is copyrighted and there are restrictions on its distribution, but these restrictions are designed to permit everything that a good cooperating citizen would want to do.  What is not allowed is to try to prevent others from further sharing any version of Heroes that they might get from you.

Specifically, we want to make sure that you have the right to give away copies of Heroes, that you receive source code or else can get it if you want it, that you can change Heroes or use pieces of it in new free programs (For instance, this section was stolen from the documentation of GNU Texinfo.), and that you know you can do these things.

To make sure that everyone has such rights, we have to forbid you to deprive anyone else of these rights.  For example, if you distribute copies of Heroes, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have.  You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code.  And you must tell them their rights.

Also, for our own protection, we must make certain that everyone finds out that there is no warranty for Heroes.  If these programs are modified by someone else and passed on, we want their recipients to know that what they have is not what we distributed, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on our reputation.

The precise conditions of the license for Heroes are found in the GNU General Public License that accompanies it.

Overview of Heroes
******************

Heroes is similar to the "Tron" and "Nibbles" games of yore, but includes many graphical improvements and new game features.

In it, you must maneuver a small vehicle around a world and collect powerups while avoiding obstacles, your opponents' trails, and even your own trail.

There are five game modes available.  Quest is the classical Nibbles, in Death Match you start with very long tails a must kill your opponents, in Kill'em All you must run over lemmings moving on the ground, in Time Cash or Color modes you must collect money or pyramids of color. Heroes features 12 original sound tracks, 94 levels (in 10 different tile sets) plus a level editor.

Heroes source code originates from an original MS-DOS game but has been heavily modified to enhance the portability and some new features have been added.  MS-DOS support has been lost by the meantime.  The original MS-DOS version can still be found on the Internet but is unmaintained and should be considered obsolete.

The current development focus on cleaning the code and port the game to available operating systems.  Our objective is to release the version 1.0 as a clean and portable base that would allow further important works such as network support or programmable vehicles.

Getting Heroes
==============

Where to fetch new releases?
----------------------------

Heroes development is powered by the free services offered by SourceForge to the Open-Source community.  The web page of Heroes is http://heroes.sourceforge.net/.

The latest releases of Heroes is always uploaded to SourceForge and available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/heroes/.  Announces are sent to the heroes-announce mailing list (see Mailing lists).

Source code releases are also uploaded to Ibiblio (formerly MetaLab, and Sunsite)) in /pub/linux/games; see the Ibiblio mirror list (http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/MIRRORS.html) to find your nearest mirror.  You will have to wait three or four days to have the files available on Ibiblio after a release.

A public CVS server is also accessible.  See

http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=7982 for details.

What to download?
-----------------

Heroes is distributed as five packages with independent version numbering and release schedule.

heroes
     The source code, info file, and man page.

heroes-data
     The level data (level maps, sprites, etc.)

heroes-sound-tracks
     Sound tracks for the game (.xm files).

heroes-sound-effects
     The sound effects for the game (.wav files).

heroes-hq-sound-tracks
     High quality sound tracks (.xm files), they will replace some sound-tracks from heroes-sound-track.

The two first packages are required, the others are optional.

The game has been so split because the data and sound files are big and don't evolve as often as the code does.  It would therefore be unfair to bloat the bandwidth by requiring the mirrors and users to download everything on each release.

Mailing lists.
==============

Three mailing lists are available for you to report bugs, discuss about the game or get announcements of new releases.

heroes-bugs@lists.sourceforge.net

     A public mailing list for bug reports.

     subscription page (http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/heroes-bugs).

heroes-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net

     A public mailing list for discussion (questions, criticism, suggestions, contributions, ...) on the game.

     subscription page (http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/heroes-discuss).

heroes-announce@lists.sourceforge.net

     A read-only and low traffic list for announcements of Heroes releases. Mails posted to this list are also forwarded to heroes-discuss so you don't need to subscribe to both lists.

     subscription page (http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/heroes-announce).

Reporting bugs, sending suggestions or contribution
===================================================

We welcome bug reports or suggestions for Heroes (either program, documentation, or data files).  This program will get better only if you report the problems you encounter.  Please email them to heroes-bugs@lists.sourceforge.net or heroes-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net.  For bug reports, please include enough information to reproduce the problem, if possible. Useful information include:

  * the version number of Heroes.

  * hardware, operating system (and OS distribution), and compiler versions.

  * any unusual options you gave to `configure'.

  * the actions necessary to reproduce the bug.

  * a description of the problem (sometimes, a snapshot may be a good description) and of the behavior you are expecting (this is not always obvious for everyone)

  * a trace of the game, as given by running Heroes with the HEROES_DEBUG environment variable set (to all, for instance).

  * a stack trace of the crash, if you compiled the game with debugging options (see below).

  * anything else that you think would be helpful.

When in doubt whether something is needed or not, include it.  It's better to include too much than to leave out something important.

To get useful core dumps, ./configure with --enable-debug and --disable-sound.

Patches are most welcome; if possible, please make them with diff -u (see diff (Diff Manual)) or diff -c (see Diff (Diff Manual)) and include ChangeLog entries (see emacs (Emacs Manual)).

When sending email, please do not encode or split the messages in any way if possible; it's much easier to deal with one plain text message, however large, than many small ones.

Do not hesitate to contribute.  This is YOUR game and the GPL allows you to apply any modifications you want to the game (provided that you keep those modifications under the GPL).  There are numerous places where you can contribute: you can hack the code (the TODO file can give you ideas but should not be seen as a limit), design new levels, create new drawings (e.g. new sets of tiles), track some new music or add your personal touch here and there.

People
======

Heroes would not be what it is presently without the following people.

Authors
-------

  * Alexandre Duret-Lutz

     Wrote the original source code, ported it to GNU/Linux and created a few levels.

  * Romual Genevois

     Had the idea of that game, designed most of it, drew the graphics, created most of the levels.

  * Alexandre Liverneaux

     Composed the soundtracks.

  * Philippe Meisburger

     Composed the soundtracks and created some levels.

Contributors
------------

  * Pierre Baillet

     Support for non-8bits depth video mode with LibGGI.

  * Uwe Hermann

     Clean-ups and portability fixes.

  * Ingo van Lil

     Latin-1 characters in fonts.

Translators
-----------

  * Hermann J. Beackers (German)

  * Jos Boersema (Dutch)

  * Luzemario Dantas Rocha (Brazilian Portuguese)

  * Alessandro Dotti (Italian)

  * Alexandre Duret-Lutz (French)

  * Ingo van Lil (German)

Packagers
---------

  * Daniel Burrows (Debian GNU/Linux)

  * Jean Delvare (RPM & Slackware Linux)

  * Eugenia Loli-Queru (BeOS)

  * Pascal Rigaux (Linux-Mandrake)

  * Maxim Sobolev (FreeBSD)

Porters
-------

  * Stéphane Denis (Win/Visual C)

  * Mattias Engdegård (Solaris)

  * Maxim Sobolev (FreeBSD)

More people are listed in the file THANKS at the top level of the Heroes tarball.

History of the DOS version
==========================

The next paragraphs are extracted from the DOS version of Heroes.

We started this game in summer 96. The idea came form Guen.  At this moment, we were only three: Guen, Toalnkor (now known as Tnk) and me (Pollux); Alexel joined us one year later.  The development was going quite slow (it took us two years actually) mainly because of our studies. Maybe the fact that Guen and me communicated by (snail-)mail was another slowing down factor.  I sent more than 60 letters to Guen during this two years !  During the first year, we decided to sell the game.  We made a demo version (with only 10 levels, no editor, and an order form), and a CD version (with songs remixed on audio track, but not used in the game). Our main issue was the price of Midas' license (the sound engine used); we were also hesitating on the way we should distribute Heroes (shall we do it shareware or commercial ?).  Finally, after a couple of wasted months we decided to spread it freeware (Enjoy !), because we thought that no one would really like to buy such a game today; today where 3D rules.

Now let's talk about the content of the game.  At first, Tnk decided to make some four channels songs in the old original mod format.  As there were only two scores done and we were waiting for the next tunes, we used some songs from Clawz just to vary. These were 'overtaking' and 'hibakusha2' and gave a better taste to the game.  So we removed old Tnk's songs and he was asked to make some more Clawz-like musics. By the time, Alexel joined and came with 10 channels XM, thus all tunes are now 8 or 10 channels XM... There were 13 tunes in the game (for a total of 2.88Mb unpacked), these are the intro tune, the menu tune, the 10 levels, and the end tune (you can't hear the later without finishing the quest game); most of them have been done by Alexel.

All sprites and pictures were drawn by Guen.  He first made some level-tiles and a set of hand-done previews of the game before any other work get started (I guess he has a few other projects at this state of development at home).  These screens and tiles were used to make the level editor.  Actually I learned C while making this editor so there is some piece of code I am not proud of into (and also in the game).  When it was nearly done, I started to code the game.  The first thing done was the introduction, and then came the multi-directional scroller.  I remember that the first level which was loaded was sized 4x4 and wrapped in all directions; this was very small but at this time there were no tails and the vehicles were crossing the walls...

Most of the levels were done by Guen. But Tnk and I also did some. Guen made a cleanup of all the levels we made: some were relegated in the EXTRALVL directory, other were simply erased. We aimed to spread the game with 100 of them, but as it is going late and that we are not going to sell the game anymore I don't know how many levels there will be.

Installation of Heroes
**********************

Needed Libraries
================

Heroes can be configured to use several libraries to handle display, sound output and joystick support.  Following is a list of supported libraries (hopefully you won't have to install all of them but just a subset).

  * LibGGI (General Graphic Interface) can be used as a display and keyboard driver. Get it from http://www.ggi-project.org/.

  * LibGII (General Input Interface) will provide joystick support (the game can be compiled without).  Get it from http://www.ggi-project.org/.  It is needed by LibGGI, by the way.

  * SDL can be used as a display and keyboard driver.  Recent revisions will also provide support for joysticks.  Get it from http://www.libsdl.org/.

  * Allegro, a game programming library, can be used as a display, keyboard, and joystick driver.  http://alleg.sourceforge.net/.

  * LibMikMod is a sound library. You don't need it if you want to compile Heroes without sound support.  Get it from http://www.mikmod.org/ or from ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/sound/libs/.  If you install LibMikMod from sources you may want to compile LibMikMod without Alsa support (see Troubleshooting).

  * SDL_Mixer is an alternative sound engine that can be used only if you use SDL as display driver. You don't need it if you want to compile Heroes without sound support.  Get it from http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/projects/SDL_mixer/.

To summarize, install at least LibGGI, SDL, or Allegro to get video output and keyboard handling.  Install LibGII to get joystick support, unless you use a recent SDL or Allegro.  And install LibMikMod (or SDL_mixer if you have SDL) if you want sound output.

My personal preference goes to LibGGI/LibGII and LibMikMod which give you more control over the drivers used.  On the other hand, SDL seems better at doing full screen display and is maintained actively.  Allegro is quite new on Unix.

Heroes also supports memory debugging libraries, such as dmalloc or efence.  See the --enable-mem-debug option in section configure options.

configure generic instructions
==============================

To be filled.

configure options for Heroes
============================

configure will do its best to find the libraries and functions needed by the game.  Still, you may give several options to configure to help it, or to fine tune special features of Heroes.

--enable-html-doc[=DIR]
     Build and install html documentation in directory DIR. If DIR is not given, install in $datadir/heroes/doc.

--disable-sound
     Turn off sound support. Sound is enabled by default, unless no sound engine is found).

--disable-joystick
     Do not include joystick support in the game.  Joystick support is enabled by default, unless you don't have GII or joystick support in SDL.

--with-sdl[=DIR]
     Specify that you want to link with SDL.  This is the default if LibGGI is not installed.  If you installed SDL in some non-standard place, you can specify the installation path as an argument.  For example:

          ./configure --with-sdl=/home/adl/usr

     configure will then look for /home/adl/usr/bin/sdl-config and configure Heroes accordingly.

--with-ggi[=DIR]
     Link with LibGGI.  This is the default if LibGGI is installed. If you installed LibGGI in some non-standard place, you can specify the installation path as an argument

--with-allegro[=DIR]
     Link with Allegro.  This is the default is neither LibGGI not SDL can be used.  If you installed Allegro in some non-standard place, you can specify the installation path as an argument

--with-mikmod[=DIR]
     Use LibMikMod four sound output.  This is the default if LibMikMod is installed and LibGGI have been selected.  You may specify where LibMikMod is installed using the optional argument.

--with-sdl-mixer[=DIR]
     Use SDL_mixer for sound output.  This is the default if SDL_mixer is installed and SDL has been selected.  You may specify where SDL_mixer is installed using the optional argument.  Using this option implies --with-sdl.

--disable-heroes-debug
     Turn off tracing support.  See the description of the HEROES_DEBUG variable (see Environment).  This is enabled by default to facilitate bug reporting.  Using this options should reduce the size of the resulting binary, and speed up the game by an indiscernible amount.

The following options are for developing purpose.  The default configuration should be suitable for end users (i.e. players) but people attempting to hack the code may want debugging symbols or compiler warnings.

--enable-debug
--disable-debug
     This is a three state option.  The default is to compile with debugging symbols: this produce bigger binaries but allow to get helpfull coredumps, without slowing down the game.  You may want to use --enable-debug to include more debugging data and turn on some debugging code.  Use --disable-debug to turn this off. Translators: you do want to turn this option on, really!  Because the debugging code includes some checks on the translated messages.

--disable-optimizations
     Turn off compiler optimizations options.  This can ease debugging. If you want to supply your own optimizations options, use something like --enable-optimizations='-O3 -march=pentium'.

--enable-warnings
     Try to turn on a large bunch of compiler warnings.

--enable-assert
     Turn on some assertions squattered over the source code. This can slow down things a bit.

--enable-devel
     Is a shorthand for --enable-debug --disable-optimizations --enable-warnings --enable-assert.

--with-mpatrol
     Link with MPatrol, a malloc() debugger.

--with-mtrace
     Use GNU libc's mtrace() facility to check malloc() usage.

--with-dmalloc
     Link with Dmalloc, a malloc() debugger.

--with-efence
     Link with Electric Fence, a malloc() debugger.

--enable-mem-debug
     Check for mtrace(), Dmalloc, or Electric Fence.  Use the first found.

--enable-gprof
     Enable profiling support with gcc, you need gprof to inspect the file resulting from a run of Heroes.

--disable-display
     This disable all screen output, making the game rather unplayable. This suppress decencies over third party libraries like GGI or SDL, therefore you may find it useful with some debugging tools like checkergcc.

Building a relocatable package
==============================

Relocation refers to the ability to install or move the game in a directory which is different from the one it has been configured for.  This usually happens if you create a binary package for Heroes and don't know in advance where the user will unpack it.  This section describe how Heroes find for his files, in order to allow relocatable packages.  Most people don't need to read this section, only packagers might be interested.

The values of the ./configure options you used to specify directories (such as --prefix, --bindir, or --datadir) are all transformed into paths relative to PREFIX and then hardcoded into the Heroes binary.  Because Heroes uses only paths relative to PREFIX, the relocation process is just a matter of guessing the correct value of PREFIX at runtime.  This guess is done using various informations available: first the original value of PREFIX is tried, then PREFIX is computed from the path to the current binary (argv[0]) when available, then the content of the environment variable PATH is used to find the binary and derive PREFIX, finally Heroes assumes it is running from the BINDIR directory. The whole process is not garanteed to succeed, but you can also override those paths with some enivronment variables (see Environment).

Machines
========

Heroes has been reported to compile and run on the following architectures.  Since Heroes can use SDL, GGI, or Allegro as display driver, the following list shows the driver which was used.

Linux/i386 (GGI, SDL, or Allegro)
     Should build out of the box.  Packages for some Linux distributions are available from the web pages.

     Suse 7.1 users, the libc shipped with your distribution (glibc-2.2-7) will crash every time Heroes calls the ngettext() function.  The workaround is to configure Heroes with configure --with-included-gettext so that it uses its own version of ngettext().

     Red Hat 7.0 users, the compiler shipped with your distribution (packaged as gcc-2.96-54.i386.rpm) is an experimental version which is still bugged despite the pile of fixes applied.  It actually produces unfaithful code for Heroes, so please use another compiler. Either upgrade to a newer version (gcc-2.96-64.i386.rpm is known to work) or use the one provided by the kgcc package.

Linux/m68k (SDL)
     Is reported to work when the sound (SDL_mixer) is disabled (configure --disable-sound or heroes -S).  Any feedback on this issue is welcome.  See also the BUGS file.

FreeBSD (SDL)
     Should build out of the box. Packages are available from the web pages.

Solaris (SDL)
     Should build out of the box.

Win32/MinGW32 (SDL)
     Can be cross-compiled (native compilation untested).  The script used to cross build the Heroes package available on the web page is in the subdirectory arch/mingw32.

Win32/VisualC (SDL)
     See the files in the arch/VisualC subdirectory of the Heroes CVS tree.  We used to distribute these files along with the rest of the sources, but stopped because they are now completely out-of-date (they have not been updated since version 0.7).  However you can use them as a start point if you think about compiling Heroes with MSVC.

Digital Unix (GGI)
     Should build out of the box.

NetBSD (SDL)
     I had to tweak SDL 1.1.6 to get it working, and also force Heroes' configure to use the result of sdl-config --static-libs instead of sdl-config --libs.  Both issues should be fixed today (FIXME: need to check).

OpenBSD 2.9 (GGI & SDL)
     It looks like some configure hints need to be given when using either libs.

     A build of Heroes configured with GGI will apperently complete successfully, however the resulting binary fails to load, with the dynamic loader complaining about a missing symbol from libpthread.  So you'd rather configure Heroes with

          ./configure --with-ggi=/usr/local LDFLAGS=-pthread

     Then Heroes appears to work fine.

     If you prefer to use SDL, things are different. I had to configure Heroes with

          ./configure --with-sdl=/usr/local LDFLAGS=-L/usr/X11R6/lib X11BASE=/usr/X11R6

     Unfortunately, the resulting binary froze when initializing SDL (in SDL_init()).  Please send us a note if you are luckier. FIXME: Look how other packages using SDL are built, I'm probably missing something.

IRIX 6.5 (SDL)
     Heroes 0.7 has been reported to compile and run with SDL 1.1.3 and gcc + libraries from freeware.sgi.com on IRIX 6.5.

BeOS (SDL)
     Heroes 0.9 has been reported to compile and run out of the box.

If you got Heroes working on a platform which is not listed here, please send a notice to heroes-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net.

Running Heroes
**************

heroes options
==============

Heroes call be launched with various options.

-v
--version
     Display Heroes version number and copyright informations.

-h
--help
     Print a help message about these run-time options.

-q
--quiet
     Disable warning messages.  This can be useful on platform such as Windows were such messages will pop up a text window.

-Q
--really-quiet
     Same as -q, but disable error messages too.

-vOPTIONS
--verbose=CHANNELS
     Enable debugging output.  CHANNELS can take the same values as HEROES_DEBUG (see Environment).

-lWORD
--list=WORD

     Show various internal information.  WORD can be debug, levels, preferences, resources, sound-drivers, or sound-tracks.

     --list=debug will list the available debugging channel, to be used with --verbose or HEROES_DEBUG (see Environment).

     --list=levels displays the list of installed levels (only the game levels, not the extra levels).

     --list=sound-drivers is used to print LibMikMod's drivers list. The expected output is something like this:

          % heroes --list=sound-drivers
          LibMikMod version 3.1.7

          Available drivers:
           1 Enlightened sound daemon (EsounD) driver v0.2.12
           2 Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) driver v0.3.2
           3 Open Sound System driver v1.5
           4 Raw disk writer (music.raw) v1.1
           5 Wav disk writer (music.wav) v1.2
           6 Piped Output driver v0.1
           7 Standard output driver v1.1
           8 Nosound Driver v3.0

     --list=resources will dump the list of file resources.  File resources are kinds of aliases used internally to name files and directories.  They can be overwritten in you configuration file using the setrsc: command.  This command will also list the original (default) value of the resource if it has been overwritten.

     --list=sound-tracks will print the list of sound-tracks used in the game in a format compatible with the soundconf: command (see heroesrc).

     --list=preferences will print the preferences and their values, as they would be saved in ~/.heroes/preferences.

-d N[,OPTIONS]
--driver=N[,OPTIONS]
     With LibMikMod, specify the driver to use. N is the number of the driver taken from the output of heroes --list=sound-drivers. Use 0 for auto-detection.  Additional options can be given to the driver, see LibMikMod's README file.

     With SDL_mixer, override some audio parameters.  freq and buffers are the two recognized parameters.  Example

          heroes -d freq=11050:buffers=512

-S
--no-sound
     Disable sound output completely (both sound tracks and sound effects).

-X
--no-sfx
     Disable sound effects only.

-m
--mono
     Output sound in one single channel.  This has no effect if the game is compiled without sound support, of course.

-8
--8bits
     Output sound in 8bits, rather than 16.  You will need this option if you have an old sound card that can't play 16bits samples.

-i
--high-quality
     When compiled with MikMod, use the high quality software mixer.  This mixer is somewhat more expensive, but you can expect a better sound quality.  When compiled with SDL_mixer, output sound in 44kHz instead of 22kHz.

-G OPTIONS
--gfx-options=OPTIONS
     Give additional options to the display driver.

     With GGI applications, the usual way to force the selection of a driver is to define the GGI_DISPLAY environment variable.  The usage and possible values of this variable are documented in the file target.txt which comes with LibGGI.  If Heroes has been compiled with GGI, the option -G will bypass the setting of GGI_DISPLAY, as if the variable was overwritten.  For instance

          % heroes -G 'tile:0,0,160,200,(x):160,0,160,200,(x)'

     is equivalant to

          % export GGI_DISPLAY='tile:0,0,160,200,(x):160,0,160,200,(x)'
          % heroes

     except that the former does not modify GGI_DISPLAY.  (BTW, the above setting uses GGI's tile driver to display Heroes in two half-windows... this maybe quite fun to try in two player mode.)

     It is also possible to prevent Heroes' GGI driver to request a 8 bit mode with -G not8.  This is necessary on some uncommon X setup to workaround a bug in GGI (see Troubleshooting).  Other legitimate GGI settings maybe supplied after a colon, as in -G not8:x.

     As SDL applications are concerned, selection of the video driver is achieved through the SDL_VIDEODRIVER environment variable.  At the time of writting this is not documented in SDL, so you will have to either RTFS or guess the possible values.  If Heroes has been compiled with SDL, the option -G with override the setting of SDL_VIDEODRIVER.  For instance you could force SDL to use the X11 driver with

          % heroes -G x11

     or

          % export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11
          % heroes

-F
--full-screen
     If Heroes is compiled with SDL, this option will turn on full screen mode.

     Otherwise, if Heroes is compiled with GGI, this option will allow Heroes to use a video mode with any size; i.e., the video surface is not constrained to 320x200 and Heroes will just center its 320x200 output. The rational is that GGI's DGA driver doesn't switch video modes.  So unless your X server run in 320x200 it would be hard to use the DGA driver otherwise.  Here is the typical settings for ``full-screen'' DGA output:

          % heroes -G dga -F

     Admittedly the name of --full-screen is quite misleading here since this option can provide you with a 320x200 stamp centered on your 1600x1200 display...

-2
--double
     Stretch the game twofold before blitting to screen.  This is slow.

-3
--triple
     Stretch the game threefold before blitting to screen.  This is even slower.

-4
--quadruple
     Stretch the game fourfold before blitting to screen.  This has been requested by people which can run heroes -3 smoothly.

-e
--even-lines
     Display only even lines, leaving blank scan lines as on real arcade monitors.  This will contribute to make options -2, -3 and -4 faster.

--cpu-off
     Disable computer opponents driving.  The opponents are still there (there will always be four players) but they are no more driven: they turn when they hit wall.  You won't want to use this options, it is here for historical reason: when the game was started in 1996 this used to suppress some overhead on slow machines.

--default-scores
--default-options
--default-saves
     Don't read the corresponding file, but use default value instead. The files will be saved at the end of the game anyway, so you can use these options to revert the default value of the given file. Another way to do this is simply to delete the file, it will be created the next time Heroes run.

-s
--swap-sides
     Swap sides when playing in two player mode.  The default is to have player one on the right and player two on the left, because the default key bindings use the arrows for player one and left letters keys for player two.

--no-double-fx
     Disable superposition of rotozoom and waves.  This is also a prehistoric option.  These two visual effects lead to a small overhead that one may not want to combine on a slow host.

-g
--go
     Skip the game introduction, start right on the main menu.

-J
--no-joystick
     Disable joystick handling.  Most of the time you will use this because you don't have a joystick and are annoyed by the warning message output when heroes start.

Environment variables
=====================

HEROES_DEBUG
------------

The very first action of Heroes when it starts is to look the environment for a HEROES_DATA_DIR variable.  If Heroes has been compiled with the --enable-heroes-debug configure option (which is the default), this variable specify the kind of debug messages that should be printed out.  Possible values are the following (they can be printed using the --list=debug option).

SECTION
     The different parts of the game (introduction, demonstration, menus, ...).

SYSTEM
     Handling of environment variables, creation of directories, initialization of libraries.

RESOURCE
     Filename Resources Handling.

FILE
     Files And Directories Handling.

LEVEL
     Levels Handling.

SOUND_TRACK
     Sound Track Events.

SOUND_EFFECT
     Sound Effects Events.

VIDEO
     Events related to the display interface.

JOYSTICK
     Joystick Initialization And Events.

TIMER
     Timer Handling.

MISC
     Miscellaneous Events.

FADER
     Palette Fade Events.

BONUS
     Bonus handling.

ALL
     All of the above.

Multiple values can be separated by :, and a value is negated if prefixed by -.  For example the following command line sets HEROES_DEBUG so that all messages get printed except those related to timer handling.

     export HEROES_DEBUG=all:-timer

HEROES_PREFIX
-------------

The HEROES_PREFIX indicate the base directory where Heroes was installed.  It is equivalant to the --prefix option of configure.  This variable is not found the default prefix (configured at build time) will be used, usually this is something like /usr/local or /usr. Type heroes --list=resources | grep prefix to see the value actually used by Heroes.

Most people don't need to set this variable.  This is only useful if you got Heroes as a binary distribution and want to move files around.

HEROES_DATA_DIR
---------------

The HEROES_DATA_DIR variable may specify the path were the data files are located.  It thus allows you to relocate the data file.  If this variable is not found the default path (configured at build time) will be used.  Run heroes --list=resources | grep data-dir to see the value actually used by Heroes.

The path to datafiles is adjusted automatically if you set HEROES_PREFIX (because it is a subdirectory of HEROES_PREFIX), so most people don't need to set HEROES_DATA_DIR.

HEROES_LOCALE_DIR
-----------------

The HEROES_LOCALE_DIR variable override the path were the message catalogs are looked for.  The default value is hardcoded into the Heroes binary, and you can see it if you run heroes --list=resources | grep locale-dir.

As for HEROES_DATA_DIR, changing HEROES_PREFIX is usually enough because HEROES_LOCALE_DIR is a subdirectory of HEROES_PREFIX.

HOME
----

The HOME variable is used to locate your home directory. You can also use HEROES_HOME.

~/.heroes/heroesrc
==================

Each time you start heroes, it tries to read the system-wide configuration file heroesrc (in the $datadir/heroes/etc/ directory) and from the ~/.heroes/heroesrc in your home directory.

option:
-------

You can specify options in that file, they will be processed before any options given on the command line.  Put the word Options: in front of a line, and write the options after (separated by spaces, as on the command line, except that there is no quoting or variable substitution).  For example, if you want that Heroes always skip the introduction, and swap the player sides, add the following line to your ~/.heroes/heroesrc:

     Options: -g -s

Multiple Options: lines can be given, they are processed in order.

setenv:
-------

You can also have line starting with setenv:, followed by a variable name and a value (the rest of the line, after the variable name is taken as the value).  This will setup the corresponding environment variable.  This provide a way to configure the used libraries.  For example, to instruct SDL to use its DGA driver, use the following line:

     setenv: SDL_VIDEODRIVER dga

This may seam redundant with --gfx-options and --driver but can be used to configure other libraries.  For example, setup GGI or SDL to use AAlib (the ASCII art rendering library) and configure AAlib via its AAOPTS variable.

extradir:
---------

Lines starting with extradir: are used to specify additional extra levels directories.

soundconf:
----------

The soundconf: lines are used to introduce configuration files defining the sound tracks played by the game.  The format of such files is as follow:

     ALIAS:FILENAME:TITLE:AUTHOR
     ...

Where ALIAS is the name of the sound track used internally by Heroes, FILENAME is the filename of the sound track you want to be loaded, TITLE is the title of the sound track, and AUTHOR is the person who tracked that music.

You may give several definitions for the same alias, in which case only the latest will be used (and of course your configuration file is read after heroes has setup its default aliases so you can overwrite them).

Presently the set of used aliases include INTRO,MENU,HEROES01,HEROES02,...,HEROES10, and ENDSCROLL.  You can overwrite them, but you can also define your own aliases: they will be available in the jukebox menu.

To give one full example, imagine you want to hear /music/2nd-reality.s3m when you are playing Heroes in the second world (desert and pyramids).  What you do is this

     % cd ~/.heroes
     % echo "HEROES02:/music/2nd-reality.s3m:\
     Second Reality:Purple Motion" > mymod
     % echo "soundconf: /home/adl/.heroes/mymod" >> heroesrc

In this example, the configuration file has been put in the ~/.heroes directory but you can put it anywhere provided the filename given after soundconf: points to it.

All that sound configuration stuff should allow you to make drop-in replacement for heroes modules.  You just make a set of modules available with a configuration file that any user can get read from its ~/.heroes/heroesrc.

You can run heroes --list=sound-tracks to print the list of sound-tracks used by heroes, and hence verify the correctness of your configuration.

setrsc:
-------

This follow the same format as setenv but is used to overwrite some filenames used by the game.  Heroes internally handles file or directory names using name aliases called file resources whose values (actual filenames) can be overwritten by setrsc and are subject to variable expansion.

The command heroes --list=resources will list all the resources used by the game.  data-dir is a special resource which content is setup from the HEROES_DATA_DIR environment variable, or from the path used to install the files when the game was built. home-dir is initialized from the HOME environment variable.

An example of setrsc: usage is to run the game with an alternate picture file.  Say you are working on a modified version of the main font used in the game, you can override the installed picture by yours with the following line.

     setrsc: main-font /home/adl/heroes-dev/tmp/fontem.pcx

keepsgid: and keepsuid:
-----------------------

By default, if Heroes has a sgid-bit or suid-bit, it will drop all privileges once the score and saved games are open.  This happens before the user configuration is read, and therefore before the display and sound are initialized.

Sometime you do not want these privileges to be dropped because your setup requires them.  For instance your display driver might require read/write access to /dev/mem, or a similar requirement may exist for the sound library).

keepsgid: yes and keepsuid: yes can be used to instruct Heroes to keep the s-bit privileges for its whole life.  These commands can only be used in the system-wide configuration file.

Sharing a global score file
===========================

In its default configuration, Heroes will create a score file in each user's directory.  However you may want to share a global score file for many users.  This can easily be done by redefining the filename used by Heroes to read and write the score file.  This filename is a resource, so it can be overwritten in an heroesrc configuration file.

If you are the installer of Heroes, you can do this from the system wide heroesrc with a line like the following

     setrsc: score-file $(sys-dir)/scores

The same considerations apply to saved games (saved-games-file).

$(sys-dir) is another resource the value of which defaults to /var/games/heroes.  According to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard this is the place where you should store modifiable game files. If you need to change this, simply add another setrsc: line:

     setrsc: sys-dir /site/var/games/heroes

By the way, you will have to create the $(sys-dir) directory yourself, because Heroes is not smart enough (and probably doesn't have the right to create that directory anyway).

Now you have to make several choices regarding the policy for granting access to that file.  This is a global score files, so you need to devise a setup which allows Heroes to write that file whoever run the game. The most straightforward way to allow this is to create the scores file with 666 permission... you probably don't want to do this because everybody would be allowed to damage the file.

A cleaner idea is to create a special user or group to own that file, and grant heroes the appropriate rights (set-user-id or set-group-id).  Setting heroes as a set-user-id program is a security problem, because if someone manage to get heroes to execute arbitrary code, he can have the game overwriting itself.  So the correct solution is to set heroes as a set-group-id program, and make the score file writable only by that group.  At worse, if someone manage to break into heroes, s/he will only be able to damage the score file.

Here is a sample setup where heroes is configured as a set-group-id program for a group called `games':

     % cd /usr/games && ls -l heroes
     -r-xr-sr-x    1 root     games     2074633 Mar 25 22:29 heroes
     % cd /var/games/heroes && ls -la
     drwxr-xr-x    2 root     games        4096 Mar 25 22:35 ./
     drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root         4096 Mar 25 19:59 ../
     -rw-rw-r--    1 root     games        2291 Mar 25 22:35 scores

Note that /var/games/heroes is not writable by group games, so you have to create the file scores before Heroes can use it.

When heroes is run as a set-group-id or set-user-id program, it executes some code to drop this privilege whenever possible.  Basically, it will revert its effective-group-id and effective-user-id to the player's group-id and user-id on startup and only switch back to it's file-group-id and file-user-id when it needs to write to a file in the $(sys-dir) directory.  This is what the $(sys-dir) resource is for: a file which is beyond that directory is opened with the file-group&user-id (i.e. group `games' in the above example), any other file is opened using the player's group(s) and user-id.  The visible consequence is that files created in the ~/.heroes directory won't be owned by group games (or whatever you chose).

Finally, note that Heroes does keep track of how a resource has been setup, and wont switch persona when $(sys-dir) or $(score-file) has been setup in a non-trusted way.  Roughly, all hard-coded and system-wide settings are trusted, while the user's personal settings are untrusted.

Game
====

Heroes has an `INFO' menu, that should describe the different game modes and options, with pictures and colors.  Please refer to it until this section is written.

Level editor
============

The level editor is available from the `editor' entry in the main menu. Created levels will be stored in your ~/.heroes/levels directory.

This editor is a cut down version of the one that served us to build all 100 levels of this game.  This one will allow you to construct your own levels in a quite simplified manner.

On the left side of the screen, you can see a part of your level.  You can move with keyboard or mouse (read the two next sections).  In the middle of the screen you can see the set of all the available tiles. You will pick tiles here to build you level.  And on the right there is some informations about the level and the selected (orange box) tile.

Editor keys
-----------

Here is the list of keys used in the level-editor.  You will have to learn most of them because most of these actions are available only as key-bindings.

F3
     Toggle sprite and vehicle display.

F5
     Toggle collide tests display.

ESC
     Quit and save.

Ctrl-Left
Ctrl-Right
Ctrl-Up
Ctrl-Down
Ctrl-PageUp
Ctrl-PageDown
Ctrl-Home
Ctrl-End
     Move the cursor in the tiles side.

Left
Right
Up
Down
     Move the cursor in the level side.

SPC
     Copy a tile.

d
     Setup starting positions on the selected tile.

Ctrl-f
     Fill the whole level with the selected tile.

Meta-f
Alt-f
     Fill the whole level with the two first tiles (for the 10th set of tiles).

p
     Output the level map as a big pcx file.  The file is saved in the current directory, and the file name is made by appending .pcx to the level name.

s
     Copy a sprite, or remove a sprite.

t
     Select the tile for tunnel destination.

RET
     View the level map in full screen.

Ctrl-RET
     Play animations.

Editor clicks
-------------

You can select a tiles by clicking on it with the left mouse button. Keeping this button pulled down will allow you to move the map without using the keyboard.

The middle button (if you have one) used in the left side will temporally select a tile, as if you were using the t key.

The right button, used in the left side, will copy a tile to the pointed tile, in a way it behaves like the space key.

Tunnels
-------

Copy your two tiles that are the entrances of your tunnel.  Move the box-pointer on one, and select it if the t key (or click on it with the middle button).  Once you will move the pointer, this tile will appear in a dashed box.  Move on the second tunnel and click on the [GO TO] box that is on the right of your screen.  Now you have set up the first way: for now if your were playing on this level you could go from this place to the dashed one, but from the dashed to this one.  So you also have to set up the tunnel in the other way: select the current tiles with t, move on the former and click on [GO TO]. That's all.

Notice that with this technique you can also typeset some kind of triangular tunnel. Let A, B, C be the entrances, you could setup the way like that A->B, B->C, and C->A.

The coordinate 0x0 if used for the destination denotes a non-setup way.  That's why you can't put a tunnel on the 0x0 position.

Sprites
-------

With some set of tiles (like the Egyptian one), there are tiles (like palm trees) designed to be used as `sprites', i.e. put over others with transparency. You have to use the s key for this:

  * copy the ground tile with SPC or the first button

  * copy the sprite tile with s (and if you don't see any sprite on the level, press F3).

Animations
----------

You may have noticed that during the game, some tiles are animated: color cycle (like the speed arrows) or moving objects (ventilators). Each frame of an animation is actually a separate tile.  The different tiles of an animations are drawn horizontally in the sets.  To setup an animation, you just have to select the first one and copy it into your level.  Optionally, press Ctrl-RET to see the animation. When the orange box is on an animated tile, you should find a button on the right to modify the speed: the greater the number is, the slower the animation goes.

Departures
----------

Select a tile and press the d key. Then look at the right side, select a color and click on the arrow you want (if you don't see any vehicle on the level, press F3).

Troubleshooting
===============

Video mode
----------

This game was primary made for MS-DOS, with VGA 320x200x8bits display. If GGI is used to manage the video modes and you run into trouble with video modes, I suggest you play with a environment variable called GGI_DISPLAY used to select the display used.  LibGGI come with a file env.txt that describes this variable.  As an alternative you may use heroes' --gfx-options option instead of the above variable.  If you want to force X display, you can add a line

     Options: --gfx-options=X

in your ~/.heroes/heroesrc file. Note: --gfx-options has no effect if you are using SDL.

We suggest you to run the game under X because in console modes (libvga, frame buffers, ...) it's easy to get stuck if the game freeze.

People using an X server that supports 8bit visuals although the default visual is not 8bit (run xdpyinfo to see a list of visuals that your X server supports) are subject to what is probably a GGI bug. Basically GGI's X driver fails to allocate the 8bit mode correctly. The symptom is

     X Error of failed request:  BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
       Major opcode of failed request:  1 (X_CreateWindow)
       Serial number of failed request:  24
       Current serial number in output stream:  31

One workaround is to prevent Heroes from negociating a 8bit video mode. Specify --gfx-options not8 to that effect.  The default visual depth for your server will then be selected by GGI.  (Of course this is slower because Heroes internally works in 8bit mode; use of another display depth involves a conversion.)

Keyboard
--------

There is a menu `KEYS' in the submenu `OPTIONS' that lets you change the key bindings used during the game.  Please set the keys here before playing since key codes can vary from place to place (hmm...  is that right?).

Sound effects
-------------

You may find that there is some delay between an action and the associated sound effect.  This is because libmikmod is polling in a buffer and is thus always one buffer ahead in the playback. It is possible to reduce the size of that buffer using some driver parameters, please see the section `DRIVER PARAMETERS' of libmikmod's README.  For instance I'm using the OSS driver and I reduce the size of libmikmod's buffer by running heroes with the line

     Options: -d3,buffer=11,count=4

in my ~/.heroes/heroesrc file.  If you can find correct values for other drivers, please send them to me!

Sound errors
------------

If Heroes try to tell you that:

     Could not initialize sound, reason: Could not set sample size

That means that MikMod couldn't setup the 16bits output, may be because your sound card doesn't support that.  Use the -8 option to have the game running with 8bits sound output.

If you get:

     Could not initialize sound, reason: Could not set mono/stereo setting

You will have to run the game with -m, because stereo is not available.

Remember that you can always put these options in your ~/.heroes/heroes file (see heroesrc) so that you don't need to type them every time you run the game.

SegFault when using Alsa drivers with and LibMikMod
---------------------------------------------------

If you are using Alsa 0.5.x drivers (Alsa is a project to
improve the Linux sound subsystem

(See the Alsa page (http://www.alsa-project.org/) for details).) Heroes is likely to crash during it's startup.  This is because the current version of LibMikMod (3.1.9 at the time of writing) lacks support for Alsa 0.5.

A solution is to run Alsa in OSS-emulation mode: simply run heroes -d x (where x is the OSS driver number printed by heroes -n) to force LibMikMod using its OSS (Open Sound System is a set of device drivers that provide a uniform API across all the major UNIX architectures.  The Linux kernel contain free code from the commercial OSS (See this page (http://www.linux.org.uk/OSS/) for details).) interface.

As a more general solution, you may want to compile LibMikMod without Alsa support (./configure --disable-alsa) so that it never crash for any application.

heroeslvl
*********

heroeslvl is a tool that can be used to inspect the content of Heroes level files.  This is of almost no interest to the usual Heroes player, but can sometime be helpful to find bugs in levels.

heroeslvl options
=================

heroeslvl takes a list of levels to inspect in argument, and support the following options.

When no options are given, heroeslvl defaults to -ipfh.

-v
--version
     Display heroeslvl version number and copyright informations.

-h
--help
     Print a help message about these run-time options.

-p WHAT
--print=WHAT
     Select what information heroeslvl should display. WHAT can be one or more of the following characters.

     d
          Print square directions.  Square directions are used on tunnel to indicate the entrance direction, and on speed tiles to indicate the direction of the acceleration.

     f
          Print the filename of each processed file.

     h
          Print header information.  This include level size, soundtrack and tilesets to use, starting positions...

     i
          Print tile details.  This will display a list of all tiles, along with some of their attributes (type of the tile, adress of its sprite, animation information).

     t
          Print square type map.  Display a map of the level, rendering each square with a character indicating the square type.

     T
          Display the character used as type keys in the -pt output.

     w
          Print wall map.  Display a map of the level, rendering each square with a character indicating the number of neighboring walls.  (Walls are just bits indicating the directions that can be used to exit from a square; they not always map to something visible on the level.)

     @
          Print the list of tunnels, with position, direction, and destination.

-i
--indent
     Indent everything but the filenames of each level processed. Note that filenames are only displayed if requested by -pf.