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<?xml version="1.0"?>
<FILE TITLE="Platform specific issues">
<CHAP TITLE="General remarks">
<TEXT>
Liquid War is now a cross-platform game, thanks to Allegro.
So now you can play under 3 different OS, without rebooting.
I personnally never use the Windows port, since the DOS one
works better.
Anyways I almost never run Windows
for I have a nice GNU/Linux box runnning all the time,
and I find it much more adapted to my needs.
</TEXT>
<TEXT>
The same code will compile under the 3 platforms, but
with slight differences when running. C
defines are used to code the specific stuff.
</TEXT>
<TEXT>
As I said, I try to use the same code for all platforms.
This is in the long term the best solution.
Otherwise there would different branches of the source tree,
and I don't think this is a very good solution.
</TEXT>
<TEXT>
Therefore some optimizations that were performed in the
old DOS-only version have been totally removed, for they
were 100% platform dependent (ie mode-X asm coding).
Therefore, the new versions are all a little slower
than the old 5.1 stuff, but the performance loss is only
about 20%, which is not significant with today's PCs.
</TEXT>
</CHAP>
<CHAP TITLE="DOS">
<TEXT>
This is the original version.
It's the fastest one as far as I know, the safest one and
it will always be I think, since Allegro was first designed
for DOS, and DOS allows a full (but unsafe) access to all
the hardware ressources LW requires.
LW doesn't use any hardware
acceleration and it's not been designed to do so.
Unfortunately there's no network support for the DOS version
of Liquid War.
</TEXT>
</CHAP>
<CHAP TITLE="Windows">
<TEXT>
When running under a Windows box, the DOS release used to be
safer than the native Windows port. Now that DOS support is getting
really poor with recent versions of Windows, the native Windows
release of Liquid War starts begin the good choice for Windows users.
</TEXT>
<TEXT>
The other reason to choose this release rather than the DOS release
is that it has network support.
</TEXT>
<TEXT>
If you have problems running Liquid War under Windows, please check out
the "data/lw.log" file which should be written each time you run the game.
It contains the information which is displayed on the console under
other platforms, and might give you a clue about what's going wrong.
</TEXT>
</CHAP>
<CHAP TITLE="GNU/Linux">
<TEXT>
This port is the most recent one, and also the one I prefer.
Paths have been changed to an UNIXish style,
ie the data is stored in:
</TEXT>
<CODE>
/usr/local/share/games/liquidwar
</CODE>
<TEXT>
the exe in:
</TEXT>
<CODE>
/usr/local/games
</CODE>
<TEXT>
and the configuration file is
</TEXT>
<CODE>
~/.liquidwarrc
</CODE>
<TEXT>
Since not all GNU/Linux distributions have /usr/games in their path,
I also put a symbolic link to the binaries in /usr/bin.
I believe Liquid War is quite FHS compliant, so if its default
directories do not match your configuration, blame your distro
for not following the standards 8-) AFAIK the only touchy
directory is /usr/share/pixmaps which I've seen on many distribution
but does not seem to be referenced in the FHS.
</TEXT>
<TEXT>
With the latest releases of Allegro, Liquid War is becoming pretty
safe under GNU/Linux. You should also know that the GNU/Linux port is usually
the most up to date, since I very very seldom boot Windows at home
and do most of the coding under GNU/Linux.
</TEXT>
</CHAP>
</FILE>
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