Announcing Heroes 0.7

SDL Development
1

I am pleased to announce the release of Heroes 0.7.

Heroes is similar to the “Tron” and “Nibbles” games of yore, but
includes many graphical improvements and new game features.
In it, you must maneuver a small vehicle around a world and collect
powerups while avoiding obstacles, your opponents’ trails, and even
your own trail.

There are five game modes available. Quest is the classical
Nibbles, in Death Match you start with very long tails a must kill your
opponents, in Kill’em All you must run over lemmings moving on the
ground, in Time Cash or Color modes you must collect money or pyramids
of color. Heroes features 12 original sound tracks, 94 levels (in 10
different tile sets) plus a level editor.

You are invited to visit the following links:
home page: http://heroes.sourceforge.net/
screenshots: http://heroes.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
download: http://heroes.sourceforge.net/download.html

(Note: this is a source code release, the `download’ page also list
binary packages but they might not be up to date yet.)

NEWS in this version include:

  • more supported architectures (currently includes: GNU/Linux,
    FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Win32/MinGW32, Win32/VisualC, Digital
    Unix)
  • many bug fixes, in the game as well as in the installation process
  • a lot of internal revamping
    See the NEWS file for details, there have been a lot of changes not
    worth to list here.

HELP! Heroes development is open to anyone and we welcome any
contribution. In the hypothetical case you would like to spend some
time on the source code and don’t know what to do, please, ask the
mailing list: there is presently some tasks that are needed and do
not require to understand the full source tree at first.–
Alexandre Duret-Lutz

2

Wed, 29 Nov 2000 Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote:

I am pleased to announce the release of Heroes 0.7.

Looks very cool; nice graphics and tracks. :slight_smile:

However, I’m having some problems on this machine… :frowning:
It seems like the game has some timing problems or something; the fades
ocationally stops at the wrong time, and what’s worse, the game freezes when I
try to start a game. The freeze is right before the screen is entirely turned
over. The music is still playing, and the game exits nicely if interrupted, or
if the window is closed, but it won’t react on the keyboard.

This happens with SDL windowed, GGI on svgalib and GGI windowed. (I don’t have
fbdev on this machine, and SDL doesn’t recognize svgalib for some reason… Not
one of my home systems, so I haven’t bothered messing with it.)

My system is a P-II 400 with a Mach 64 based ATI card and 64 MB RAM. The OS is
Linux 2.2.10-lowlatency, compiled for i686, and the rest is basically a Red Hat
6.x system that’s mostly upgraded to 7.0. I have SDL 1.1.6 and libGGI
2.0beta2.1, and the sound card is an SB Live! (“Player” IIRC).

Any ideas, or should I just dig in and try to find out what’s going on?

Anyway, I’ll try it at home and see what happens there. (A RH 6.2 upgraded to
7.0 - if it breaks there too, one could suspect that the “beta” stuff in Red
Hat 7.0 might be the problem…)

//David

…- M u C o S -------------------------. .- David Olofson --------.
| A Free/Open Source | | Audio Hacker |
| Plugin and Integration Standard | | Linux Advocate |
| for | | Open Source Advocate |
| Professional and Consumer | | Singer |
| Multimedia | | Songwriter |
-----> http://www.linuxdj.com/mucos -'—> david at linuxdj.com -’

3

“David” == David Olofson <david.olofson at reologica.se> writes:

David> Wed, 29 Nov 2000 Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote:

I am pleased to announce the release of Heroes 0.7.

David> Looks very cool; nice graphics and tracks. :slight_smile:

David> However, I’m having some problems on this machine… :frowning:
David> It seems like the game has some timing problems or something;

[…]

This was posted one week ago, and discussed out of this list for
obvious “offtopicness”; but as the thread started here I tought
I should post a summary so it doesn’t appear to be left “open”.

There was two problems: one was a bug in some timing function of
Heroes, and the other a bug in the compiler David used (which
resulted in unfaithful code generated for the same timing
function; that’s bad luck!). This is now fixed in Heroes 0.7a
ftp://heroes.sourceforge.net/pub/heroes/prereleases/heroes-0.7a.tar.gz

David’s buggy compiler is gcc, as shipped with Red Hat 7.0 :o)
Any Red Hat 7.0 user out there should really update to gcc-2.96-64.i386.rpm
http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/rawhide/1.0/i386/RedHat/RPMS/gcc-2.96-64.i386.html
Or read those dreadly mails:
http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/5765/0/4778014/
http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/5765/0/4778777/

Thanks David.–
Alexandre Duret-Lutz