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Samuel 'Kaiser' Villareal and James 'Quasar' Haley Present
C H O C O L A T E
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Beta Release 1
2011-02-12
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* 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.