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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:
GRAPHICS ISSUES:
Q: The game is *extremely* slow on my system running Windows and using OpenGL output.
A: It might be that you're using the OpenGL drivers that came with your
operating system from Microsoft. These drivers don't use hardware
acceleration and therefore are extremely slow. You'll have to download and
install a real OpenGL capable driver for you graphics card. Usually these
can be downloaded from the home page of the craphics card manufacturer.
Typically nVidia, ATI and others.
Note, that if you do absolutely cannot get OpenGL working reliably on your
system, you can still run the game in pure SDL output mode. For this, you
must either use a 'MS-DOS command line prompt' and type
freedroidRPG -n
inside this command line, or you can also make a link to freedroidRPG.exe
and then edit the link properties and add the -n after freedroidRPG.exe in
the link properties dialog box.
Q: The game is *extremely* slow on my Linux machine with OpenGL enabled.
A: The reason for this might be that you're not using hardware accelerated OpenGL.
Software OpenGL should be avoided. If you don't have hardware-accelerated
OpenGL on your system (because e.g. your graphics card manufacturer doesn't
make suitable Linux drivers), you might be much better off when disabling
OpenGL support altogether. For this, you can use command line switch -n,
i.e type
freedroidRPG -n
to start the game with OpenGL output disabled. Graphics will revert to
pure SDL mode.
SOUND ISSUES:
Q: My sound isn't working with FreedroidRPG. I don't hear anything.
A: 1.) Make sure your sound is working with other applications. If you
don't hear anything when trying to play simple mp3 files or ogg files,
then the sound system on your machine is not properly set up and it's
not a freedroid related problem. In that case, you must install your
sound card properly first. Otherwise sound can not work with
freedroid.
2.) See if you have the SDL_mixer libraries installed. You might want
to use "locate SDL_mixer" and see if you get a lot of results. If
not, then the missing SDL_mixer library is the problem.
See if you have libogg and libvorbis installed.
3.) If you're compiling from source, make sure the ./configure script has
properly detected the SDL_mixer library. Just look at the ./configure
output. There should be a line like:
checking for Mix_ChannelFinished in -lSDL_mixer... yes
If you get instead something like
checking for Mix_ChannelFinished in -lSDL_mixer... no
then the ./configure script didn't detect your SDL_mixer
installation. You might want to make sure you've got SDL_mixer and
SDL_mixer_devel packages installed or install SDL_mixer from source.
You can download everything from here:
http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_mixer/
If you compiled from source, you'll have to recompile now, because the
previous compile didn't include the sound module of Freedroid. When
the SDL_mixer stuff is installed properly, it should work after the
recompile though.
Q: My sound is lagging behind. Every sound seems to be somewhat out of sync.
A: There might be a sound daemon running on your system. Many window managers
like e.g. KDE start a sound daemon by default upon startup. To get rid of
the most common sound daemons, you can try (best as root)
killall -9 artsd
killall -9 esd
killall -9 yiff
After that, you might want to try freedroid again. The sound lag should
not be present anymore.
MISCELLANEOUS ISSUES:
Q: Do I have to have Linux to try out Freedroid/FreedroidRPG?
A: While using Linux is greatly recommended for the sanity of the system
administrator, FreedroidClassic and FreedroidRPG both have MS-Windows
executables available. Note that FreedroidRPG behaves notably better under
Linux because the development team doesn't use MS-Windows, which means it
gets much less testing. Help in that area is appreciated.
Q: How can I make changes to the map in FreedroidRPG?
A: Use the level editor integrated into FreedroidRPG. It has some - rather old
- documentation in the "developer documentation" that you can find on this
website, and tooltips on every button to help you find your way. Play around
with it a bit by yourself, and don't hesitate to ask on IRC or the mailing
list if you don't manage to use it.
Q: How can I add a character to FreedroidRPG?
A: This involves several steps:
1. A new map label must be created, so that the game knows where to place the
new character inside the game.
2. A dialog section should be written, so that there can be some interaction
(other than combat) with this character.
3. The dialog section should get a number associated with it, which involves
some very minor modification of the program code.
4. An entry in the character list has to be added, so that the new character
will be added in any new games from then on. (Old saved games will remain
unaffected.) You can specify what the character should look like, i.e. what
model should be used for your character and stuff like that.
Hint: Best send word to the developers. We'll be happy to help or also to
include the new character in the next version of the game, if it comes with
a good dialog.
Q: why it reminds me the old Paradroid game back in the prehistorics?
A: i'm dont' know. what is this "paradroid" ?
Q: where can I buy Freedroid T-shirts
A: no need to buy it, there is one packed with every Happy-Meal.
DEVELOPMENT ISSUES:
Q: I want to help out with FreedroidRPG development. What should I do first?
A: Best thing is to first subscribe to the freedroid-discussion mailing list, then to
take a look at the FreedroidRPG developer manual. You can find a link to it
on our project home page. Then the next thing to do is to get the latest
development version of the game from CVS, then to either make a
small patch right away or to discuss anything bigger you have in mind with the
people on the discussion mailing list, so it can be assured that all the
developers are pulling in the same direction and know what's going on and who
is working on what.
If you are new to the Sourceforge, you should also take at least a brief look
at our Sourceforge project pages. You can find the main page here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freedroid
and the other pages should be reachable from there.
Q: How can I subscribe/unsubscribe to the mailing list?
A: Freedroid has two mailing list. One is for discussing stuff related to
Freedroid, the other one is a list with auto-generated changelogs from our CVS
server and therefore only relevant for developers themselves. In any case,
you can subscribe, unsubscribe or change your membership option from the
following web page:
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=54521
Q: How can I get the latest development version from CVS?
A: This is very simple when using Linux. You can find the details here:
http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=54521
If you are using Windows, there is a section in the FreedroidRPG developer
manual mentioned above. It should have screenshots and everything, so it
should not be too hard. If you still run into problems, best again discuss it
with the people on the freedroid-discussion mailing list.
READY.
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