Liquid War (v5.5.4) - Platform specific issues




General remarks
===============


  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.

  The same code will compile under the 3 platforms, but with slight differences
  when running. C defines are used to code the specific stuff.

  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.

  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.



DOS
===


  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.



Windows
=======


  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.

  The other reason to choose this release rather than the DOS release is that
  it has network support.

  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.



GNU/Linux
=========


  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:

  /usr/local/share/games/liquidwar

  the exe in:

  /usr/local/games

  and the configuration file is

  ~/.liquidwarrc

  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.

  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.

