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--- The Detailed Node Listing ---
Overview of Heroes
Installation of Heroes
Running Heroes
Level editor
heroeslvl
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 programs1, 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.
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.
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
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.
Heroes is distributed as five packages with independent version numbering and release schedule.
heroes
heroes-data
heroes-sound-tracks
heroes-sound-effects
heroes-hq-sound-tracks
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.
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.
heroes-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net
A public mailing list for discussion (questions, criticism,
suggestions, contributions, ...) on the game.
subscription page.
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.
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:
HEROES_DEBUG environment variable set (to all, for
instance).
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 Unified Format) or diff -c (see Context Format) and include ChangeLog entries
(see Change Log).
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.
Heroes would not be what it is presently without the following people.
Wrote the original source code, ported it to GNU/Linux and created a few levels.
Had the idea of that game, designed most of it, drew the graphics, created most of the levels.
Composed the soundtracks.
Composed the soundtracks and created some levels.
Support for non-8bits depth video mode with LibGGI.
Clean-ups and portability fixes.
Latin-1 characters in fonts.
More people are listed in the file THANKS at the top level
of the Heroes tarball.
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.
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).
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.
To be filled.
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]
DIR.
If DIR is not given, install in $datadir/heroes/doc.
--disable-sound
--disable-joystick
--with-sdl[=DIR]
./configure --with-sdl=/home/adl/usr
configure will then look for /home/adl/usr/bin/sdl-config
and configure Heroes accordingly.
--with-ggi[=DIR]
--with-allegro[=DIR]
--with-mikmod[=DIR]
--with-sdl-mixer[=DIR]
--with-sdl.
--disable-heroes-debug
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
--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
--enable-optimizations='-O3 -march=pentium'.
--enable-warnings
--enable-assert
--enable-devel
--enable-debug --disable-optimizations --enable-warnings --enable-assert.
--with-mpatrol
malloc() debugger.
--with-mtrace
mtrace() facility to check malloc() usage.
--with-dmalloc
malloc() debugger.
--with-efence
malloc() debugger.
--enable-mem-debug
mtrace(), Dmalloc, or Electric Fence. Use the first found.
--enable-gprof
gcc, you need gprof to
inspect the file resulting from a run of Heroes.
--disable-display
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).
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.
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.
SDL_mixer) is disabled
(configure --disable-sound or heroes -S). Any feedback on
this issue is welcome. See also the BUGS file.
arch/mingw32.
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.
sdl-config --static-libs instead
of sdl-config --libs. Both issues should be fixed today (FIXME:
need to check).
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=-pthreadThen 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/X11R6Unfortunately, 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.
gcc + libraries from freeware.sgi.com on IRIX 6.5.
If you got Heroes working on a platform which is not listed here, please send a notice to heroes-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net.
heroes optionsHeroes call be launched with various options.
-v
--version
-h
--help
-q
--quiet
-Q
--really-quiet
-q, but disable error messages too.
-vOPTIONS
--verbose=CHANNELS
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]
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
-X
--no-sfx
-m
--mono
-8
--8bits
-i
--high-quality
-G OPTIONS
--gfx-options=OPTIONS
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)' % heroesexcept 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 x11or
% export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11 % heroes
-F
--full-screen
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 -FAdmittedly 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
-3
--triple
-4
--quadruple
heroes -3 smoothly.
-e
--even-lines
-2, -3 and -4 faster.
--cpu-off
--default-scores
--default-options
--default-saves
-s
--swap-sides
--no-double-fx
-g
--go
-J
--no-joystick
HEROES_DEBUGThe 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
SYSTEM
RESOURCE
FILE
LEVEL
SOUND_TRACK
SOUND_EFFECT
VIDEO
JOYSTICK
TIMER
MISC
FADER
BONUS
ALL
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_PREFIXThe 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_DIRThe 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_DIRThe 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.
HOMEThe HOME variable is used to locate your home directory.
You can also use HEROES_HOME.
~/.heroes/heroesrcEach 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.
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/heroesBy 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 scoresNote 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.
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.
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.
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.
pcx file. The file is saved in the
current directory, and the file name is made by appending .pcx to
the level name.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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>).
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=Xin 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: 31One 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.)
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?).
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=4in my
~/.heroes/heroesrc file. If you can find correct values for
other drivers, please send them to me!
If Heroes try to tell you that:
Could not initialize sound, reason: Could not set sample sizeThat 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 settingYou 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.
If you are using Alsa 0.5.x drivers2 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 OSS3
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.
heroeslvlheroeslvl 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 optionsheroeslvl 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
heroeslvl version number and copyright informations.
-h
--help
-p WHAT
--print=WHAT
heroeslvl should display. WHAT can
be one or more of the following characters.
d
f
h
i
t
T
-pt output.
w
@
-i
--indent
-pf.
GGI_DISPLAY: Troubleshooting, Invoking heroes
HEROES_DATA_DIR: Environment
HEROES_DEBUG: Environment
HEROES_LOCALE_DIR: Environment
HEROES_PREFIX: Environment
HOME: Environment
SDL_VIDEODRIVER: heroesrc, Invoking heroes
heroeslvl
For instance, this section was stolen from the documentation of GNU Texinfo.
Alsa is a project to
improve the Linux sound subsystem
(See the Alsa page for details).
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 for details).
| Location: / sourceforge / heroes / manual |
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