
$Id: xyiff.txt,v 1.1 1999/08/08 18:38:59 wwwwolf Exp wwwwolf $

Yiff! for X11
=============

    "Ja nytps kaikki pelaamaan kettupeli, kettupeli..."
    ("And now everybody, let's play the fox game, the fox game...")
        -- Robin Hood (Spede Pasanen) in the movie Noin Seitsemn Veljest


Port done by Weyfour WWWWolf <wwwwolf@iki.fi>
My home page is at <http://www.iki.fi/wwwwolf/>

Patched up to compile gain by LionsPhil; see
<http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~prb/projects/freechain/>

The DOS version can be found from the author's home page at
<http://www.neteng.bc.ca/~tursi/>.
The X11 port home page is at <http://www.iki.fi/wwwwolf/games/xyiff.html>.



    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA


This is the *second* release of Yiff! for X11.

Compiled with your plain old gcc with some optimization flags thrown
in... just for some performance improvement, dammit. =)
Uses XWinAllegro 3.0-12 <http://www.canvaslink.com/allegro/xwinallegro/>
and ncurses. =)

Installation:
 - Throw the binary into, say, /usr/local/games/yiff.
 - Throw data/* into, say, /usr/lib/games/yiff.
 - Say "yiff" when you want to have fun. (But I thought you already
   knew that. =)

Yiff! will search the data from the following directories:
    /usr/local/games/lib/yiff    <-- Arcane, are we?
    /usr/games/lib/yiff          <-- No, we're in Slackware.
    /usr/local/lib/games/yiff    <-- preferred IMHO
    /usr/lib/games/yiff          <-- ...if thou'lt package thy code
    /usr/local/lib/yiff          <-- These in case the Suits don't want us...
    /usr/lib/yiff                <-- ...to spend our time, ahem, creatively!
...and last from a directory specified in YIFF_GAMELIB environment
variable.

The DOS version had YIFF.INI; We have ~/.yiffrc. If this is in
conflict with the YIFF sound system or any of the yiffy programs of
yours, tell me and I'll fix this asap. =)

Last tip is the greatest one: If you think it's slow, read the
XwinAllegro documentation. It has perfectly good excuses for using
8bit mode. (Fursonally, I didn't liked the 8-bit mode, and never will
- too bad Abuse never ran in 16-bit mode.)


Building from the source
------------------------

make depend
make

This should do the trick. =) If it does, you infortunately have to
change some options. You most likely need to change the allegro
path... I have allegro in /usr/local/allegro.



What's new in 0.3?
------------------

Well, I made the argument handling sane.

Screen fades were replaced with more interesting effects. The game is
still kind of slow, but at least it's slow in an interesting way.

Ummm... I don't have any idea if the -greet still works. It seems that 
in the current release of Debian ncurses 3.4 package (in Unstable),
newwin() happily segfaults, which *isn't* part of the cool
behavior. Even the simplest ncurses programs seemed to die from that
cause.

Oh yeah... Source is out now, too. Have fun, and PLEASE, if you see
anything extraordinary that might make things more interesting, please
tell me!


Bugs that need to be fixed:
---------------------------
 - Chama said it screwed up mixer settings in DOS, and I know the
   reason =) Note that this doesn't seem to affect X11 (probably not
   implemented properly down here...)
 - SLOOOOOOOW. Well, probably also XwinAllegro's fault. =)

Stuff to do:
------------
 - Split the code in different files.
 - Make it faster.
 - Package it as .deb ...


Closing words
-------------

Oh, BTW, Tursi, the title music is J.S. Bach's Orgelkonzert a-mol
BWV593 based on Vivaldi's op.3 #8 1st mvmt (allegro), or at least
that's what the MIDI file says.

Have fun.
      - WWWWolf

