=============================================================================== Samuel 'Kaiser' Villareal and James 'Quasar' Haley Present C H O C O L A T E ______________________________._________________________ / _____/\__ ___/\______ \ \_ _____/\_ _____/ \_____ \ | | | _/ || __) | __)_ / \ | | | | \ || \ | \ /_______ / |____| |____|_ /___|\___ / /_______ / \/ \/ \/ \/ Beta Release 1 2011-02-12 =============================================================================== * What is it? * Chocolate Strife is the most accurate and complete recreation of Rogue Entertainment's "Strife: Quest for the Sigil." It was created through more than two years of reverse engineering effort with the blessings of the original programmers of the game. * Why? * The source code for Strife was lost, which means, unlike the code for all the other commercial DOOM-engine games, it cannot be released. The only access we have to the code is the binary executable file. Tools such as IDA Pro have been employed to disassemble and decompile the executable, which was cross- referenced against the Linux DOOM and DOS Heretic sources and painstakingly combed over multiple times, instruction-by-instruction, to ensure that the resulting Chocolate-Doom-based executable is as close as possible to the original. * Is it Legal? * Reverse engineering is a protected activity so long as the original code is not used directly in the product. Due to the vast amount of information lost through the process of compilation, and the need to refactor large portions of code in order to eliminate non-portable idioms or to adapt them properly to Chocolate Doom's framework, the resulting code behaves the same, but is not the *same* code. In addition, James Monroe and John Carmack have both stated that they have no objections to the project. Because they are the original authors of the code, and neither Rogue nor their publisher, Velocity, Inc., exist any longer as legal entities, this is effectively legal permission. The transformed results of the disassembly have been combined with the raven-branch version of the Chocolate Doom source port by Simon 'fraggle' Howard, with his direct assistance, and have been released for the benefit of the community under the GNU General Public License v2.0. See the file "COPYING" for more details * Is it Perfect? * Not yet. That's where you come in. Help us by reporting any discrepancies you may notice between this executable and the vanilla DOS program! However, do *not* report any glitch that you can replicate in the vanilla EXE as a bug. The point of Chocolate Strife, like Chocolate Doom before it, is to be as bug-compatible with the original game as possible. Also be aware that some glitches are impossible to compatibly recreate, and wherever this is the case, Chocolate Strife has erred on the side of not crashing the program, for example by initializing pointers to NULL rather than using them without setting a value first. * What are some known problems? * - You must run the game with the -mb parameter, and set the heap size as high as possible. There is a limitation in the low-level Chocolate Doom sound code which will cause the zone heap to fragment, and a Z_Malloc error will occur when certain very large dialogue voice sounds are loaded from voices.wad. We hope that fraggle will repair this soon. Ex: chocolate-strife -mb 250 - Demos recorded without the -nomonsters parameter currently don't sync (this includes the internal IWAD demo). We do not know why yet; perhaps someone can help us find out ;) - Netplay is not currently possible, because the raven-branch version of Chocolate Doom does not yet have a working, coherent networking engine that can support any of the games except for Doom. This is also currently in progress by fraggle. - Portions of the status bar flash when resizing the screen. We believe this is due to lack of the vanilla executable's "dirty rectangles" refresh system, which may need to be adjusted with a brute-force workaround. - Torch objects sometimes emit a "pipping" sound. We do not know why this happens under Windows but not in the original program, as the code which is playing this sound has been verified identical multiple times. We may have to disable the code which is playing this sound, which is supposed to sound like fire crackling, but for some reason is inaudible in the original game. - v1.31 emulation is not complete yet. This means that you cannot currently select a separate save file (only the v1.2 version of the code is in place right now). The final Chocolate Strife version will be able to act like either v1.2 *or* v1.31, including all of the known differences between the two executables (which number around 5 total). - The demo version is *not* supported, and there are not any current plans to support it in the future, due to the vast number of differences (the demo version of Strife is based on a much earlier beta version of Rogue's codebase). You should use a commercial Strife IWAD file, preferably of version 1.2 or later. * How do I use it? * From the Run box or a command line, issue a command to Chocolate Strife just like you would run Chocolate Doom. Most of the same command line parameters are supported. voices.wad will be read from the same directory as the IWAD, if it can be found. If it is not found, then voices will be disabled just as would happen with the vanilla executable. Do not add voices.wad using -file, as that is redundant and unnecessary. Some new command-line parameters in Chocolate Strife include the following: -nograph Disables the graphical introduction sequence. -devparm implies this. (More to come: -work, -flip) * Copyright * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. See the "COPYING" file for the full license text. The source code for this program is available from the same location where you downloaded this package. Aside from Chocolate Doom, portions of the code are derived from the Eternity Engine, Copyright 2011 Team Eternity, as published under the GNU GPL.