freeVikings: User's Manual

Game is written completely in Ruby. Because Ruby is an interpreted programming language, it isn't needed (and most probably even not possible) to compile the code. You just have to install Ruby interpreter and a few libraries. Both the interpreter and all needed libraries are licensed by open source licenses and you can download them all for free.

	      $ ruby extconf.rb
	    

	      $ make
	    

	      # make install
	    

	    C:\kuba\freeVikings> ruby -rubygems freevikings.rb
	  

	    $ gem install log4r
	  

	[~]$ cd freeVikings
	[~/freeVikings]$ ruby freevikings.rb
      

freeVikings accept many useful commandline options. To learn more about them, execute

      [~/freeVikings]$ ruby freevikings.rb --help
    

I designed freeVikings with aim of immitating Lost Vikings where the old game was good and making it better where needed. Following this philosophy I am doing my best to copy keyboard controls inside game and add a few mouse controls (currently it is possible to use mouse for switching between vikings, selecting item inside inventory and moving items between vikings). On the other side I implemented exitting and giving up differently, because it took several minutes before I guessed how to do this in Lost Vikings.

General:

Switching between vikings:

All three vikings:

Baleog (green guy):

Erik (blue guy):

Olaf (yellow guy):

Maybe the most tricky thing in Lost Vikings was inventory using. In freeVikings this traditional tricky keyboard-commanded system has been preserved, but additional possibility to use mouse instead has been added.

Items are collected as vikings touch them, so you don't to bother with pushing any key to collect them. They are stored in vikings' inventories. Every inventory has four slots and if these are full, viking cannot collect any more items. To make some slots free, viking can either delete some item (which might be useful later!) or give it to any of his friends.

On the image below you can see the bottom of game screen. Active viking is Baleog (his portraid is coloured - the others are black and white). The yellow frame shows which item in the inventory is active.

Press Tab. Game is paused and the yellow frame started blinking. You can use cursor keys to move yellow frame around the inventory. If you press Delete now, the active item is deleted. Press Tab again to unpause and continue playing.

You can select another item in viking's inventory also by clicking on it. Mouse can also be used to delete item: click it and drag it to the trash icon.

The most complicated case: you need to move one of Baleog's items to Erik. Before it is possible, all the exchange participants (Erik and Baleog in this case) must touch each other. Now press Tab (pauses game, switches to 'inventory mode') and then Space (which switches to 'items exchanging mode'). Frame in active viking's inventory is now green and blinking. Inventories of vikings which can't participate in the exchange get darker (see Olaf's). Use cursor keys left/right to move active item between vikings. Than push Space to switch to 'normal inventory mode' again.

You can do the same - move items between vikings - also using a mouse. Click an item and drop it over some other viking's portrait or inventory. It should appear in his inventory. If it returns to the inventory where you picked it, you should ensure that the two vikings touch each other (otherwise they can't give items to each other).

Since release 0.8 you cancustomise default behavior of freeVikings by creating configuration file in your $HOME directory.

Create directory .freeVikings (trailing dot is important!) and copy freeVikings/config/config.rb there. It shouldn't be hard to modify it, because it contains many helpful comments.

If you from any reason can't place your configuration file in the way described above (e.g. your OS doesn't support folders with dot in name), place it wherever you want and define environment variable FREEVIKINGS_HOME which will contain path to directory with your config.rb .

      $ export FREEVIKINGS_HOME=/home/igneus/my_freevikings_home
    

While playing with freeVikings, you can encounter several kinds of problems. It is usually useful to start program from console, because code of freeVikings is full of debugging output and logging engine is set up so that it should print all important messages to the standard error output. You should also consider running freeVikings with Log4r (as discussed in Chapter 1, Installation)

If you encounter an error and you can't solve it yourself, you can ask me for support. Before writing an e-mail, you should

I'll do my best to help you.