Updated Readme's

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi,

Attached are updated readmes of both the standard user readme, and the
developers one. I have unbundled AUTHORS, INSTALL.UNIX and COPYING from the
user one. I have expanded some sections, stolen a bit of information off the
web, and added a command line options section.

The readme-devel.txt is a first draft, I have mainly just stolen chunks of
text from various documents. I added in bits about SVN, the Windows
installer, and Windows development, but knowing nothing about Linux/Unix
they are exactly as they were.

Now the readme-devel.txt pretty much covers INSTALL.UNIX, so possibly that
could disappear and be replaced with a reference to readme-devel.txt?

Neil

readme-devel.txt
Description: Text document

Pingus - ReadMe

		Pingus Online Website

---

Table of Contents

		Table of Contents
		Introduction
		Pingus for Windows
		Pingus for GNU/Linux, x86
		Pingus for UNIX, non-x86
		Command Line Options - including how to speed up Pingus
		Translations
		How to help
		Contacting the Developers - bug reports, feature suggestions

---

Introduction

Pingus has started at the end of 1998 with the simple goal to create a Free (as in freedom, not as in free beer) Lemmings(tm) clone. The Free means you get the sources and are allowed and encouraged to change and distribute them. You basically get everything that I used to create this game. In the years it has grown than quite a bit over the original goal and become something more than just a clone, we have original artwork, a built-in level editor, new actions, multiplayer and a few other features.

If you don't know Lemmings(tm), here comes a short introduction. Its a puzzle game developed in 1991 by DMA Design. The player takes command in the game of a bunch of small animals and has to guide them around in levels. Since the animals walk on their own, the player can only influence them by giving them commands, like build a bridge, dig a hole or redirect all animals in the other direction. The goal of each level is to reach the exit, for fix multiple combination of commands are necessary. The game is presented in a 2D site view. For more information you might want to visit Lemmings(tm) fanpage.

While Pingus is based on the idea of Lemmings(tm), it has included some other ideas, which weren't presented in the original Lemmings(tm), like the worldmap or secret levels, which might be familiar from games the Super Mario World and other Nintendo games. We have also a few new actions, like the jumper which weren't presented in the original game.

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Pingus for Windows

Download the Windows version of Pingus for Windows. After downloading double click on the file, and an installer will start. Select an installation directory, or accept the default of C:\Program Files\Pingus, and select install. There is an option to create a shortcut on the desktop, and by double clicking this you will be able to run Pingus. If you choose not to create a shortcut, then find the file Pingus.exe in the directory you installed Pingus to, and run it.

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Pingus for GNU/Linux x86

		If you run GNU/Linux on a x86 it is strongly recommended that you use the static-binares provided at the Pingus Webpage http://pingus.seul.org..

---

Pingus for UNIX and non-x86

		Please see the file INSTALL.unix included in the root directory for instructions on how to compile Pingus for your system.

---

Command Line Options

Common Options

		If you have a slow machine, starting Pingus with the following command line arguments might lead to a better game.
-g 640x480 --frame-skip 3

		Fullscreen support is available via with the argument
--fullscreen

General Options

		-w, --window - Start in Window Mode
		-f, --fullscreen - Start in Fullscreen
		-d, --datadir PATH - Set the path to load the data files to PATH
		-l, --level FILE - Load a custom level from FILE
		--worldmap FILE - Load a custom worldmap from FILE
		-v, --verbose - Print some more messages to stdout, can be set multiple times to increase verbosity
		-V, --version - Prints version number and exit
		-e, --editor - Launch the Level editor (experimental)
		--disable-auto-scrolling - Disable automatic scrolling
		--enable-swcursor - Enable software cursor
		--no-cfg-file - Don't read ~/.pingus/config
		--config-file FILE - Read config from FILE (default: ~/.pingus/config)
		--??????? - reduce CPU usage, might speed up the game on slower machines
		--controller FILE - Uses the controller given in FILE

Debugging and experimental stuff

		--maintainer-mode - Enables some features, only interesting programmers
		--debug OPTION - Enable the output of debugging infos, possible OPTION's are tiles, gametime, actions, sound, resources, gui, input, pathmgr
		--min-frame-skip N - Skip at least N frames, larger values speed the game up
		--max-frame-skip N - Skip at most N frames
		--frame-skip N - Set both min and max frameskip to N
		-t, --speed SPEED - Set the game speed (0=fastest, >0=slower)
		-b, --print-fps - Prints the fps to stdout
		--tile-size INT - Set the size of the map tiles (default: 32)
		--fast-mode - Disable some cpu intensive features
		--min-cpu-usage - Reduces the CPU usage by issuing sleep()

Demo playing and recording

		-p, --play-demo FILE - Plays a demo session from FILE
		-r, --disable-demo-recording
		--??????? - Record demos for each played level

Sound

		-s, --disable-sound - Disable sound
		-m, --disable-music - Disable music

---

Translations

		Pingus currently has Locale support for the following Languages

cs_CZ	Czech /	(ISO-8859-2)
de_DE	German / Deutsch	(ISO-8859-1)
en_US	English - default	(ISO-8859-1)
tr_TR	Turkish / Türkçe	(ISO-8859-9/ISO-8859-1)
it_IT	Italian / Italyano	(ISO-8859-1)
sv_SE		(ISO-8859-1)
sr_SR		(ISO-8859-2)

		In addition, nl - Dutch / Nederlands is currently unfinished.

If your environment is already set so that you are able to see (some) applications in the desired Language, Pingus should start directly in that language.

However, to start it directly with the language you want you should start Pingus as follows ...

LANG=tr_TR pingus
		This sets the system variable 'LANG' to the value of 'tr_TR' (in this example).

The notation may be a bit confusing. The two lowercase letters are use to denote the language, usually the two letter ISO code of the country the language is spoken in.

After the underscore (_), the two uppercase letters denote the country. Again the two letter ISO country code is used.

some examples

en_US - English, United States

en_UK - English, United Kingdom

nl_NL - Dutch, Holland/Netherlands

If you want to help the translation effort, please look at the README.translate file in the ./po directory of the source code

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How to help

You can help Pingus by downloading it, installing it, and using it. Then persuade all your friends to use it. Then once Pingus has taken over the world, our job is done.

Other ways you can help Pingus progress are:

Send in bug reports

Create new levels - using the inbuilt level editor

If you are a programmer, contribute to debugging and developing

---

Contacting the Developers

Mailing Lists

		There are currently two mailing lists available:

pingus-devel - A list for discussing development issues, like level creation or code changes, but might as well be used for user issues like how to solve levels and such

pingus-cvs - Read-only list to which all CVS commits get submitted, only intersting for developers in general

		For information on how to subscribe to any of these lists have a look at http://pingus.seul.org/contact.html.

IRC

		For a quick help you can try the IRC server irc.freenode.net:6667 and the channel #pingus, you can find the project maintainer (nick: grumbel) there most of the time. From time to time there will also be IRC Mettings with larger parts of the development team, once such meetings happen, they will get announced in the news section on the Pingus webpage.

Bug Reports

		Questions about the game and bug reports should go to the pingus-devel lists. If you have a real bug report or want to browse the list of open bug reports you can do that at the Savannah Bug Tracker at http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=pingus.