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This is a list of frequently asked questions and their answers. If you have some questions about Crystal Space, try consulting this list first.
A: The latest release of Crystal Space is always available from the Crystal Space home page, and from the Crystal Space FTP site ftp://sunsite.dk/projects/crystal/. You can also access the bleeding-edge developmental version. See section 1.5 Where to Get Crystal Space.
A: You need the source code, which you can obtain in a variety of ways. See section 1.5 Where to Get Crystal Space. You also need a compiler and development system for the platform which you are using. Some of the supported compilers are GCC (including MINGW and CYGWIN), MSVC and Code Warrior.
A: You need the following items:
Note that there exist two types of executables: staticly linked and dynamically linked. If you have a staticly linked executable (for example, the DOS executable will always be static) then you don't need any of the following drivers. Otherwise you will need the remaining items.
A1: Are you sure that you have downloaded all the necessary components, as explained by the previous section? If not, then download the missing components.
A2: In general, Crystal Space requires an 8, 15, 16, or 32-bit display and will not work with other displays modes. Note, however, that the MacOS/X Server, OpenStep, and NextStep ports of Crystal Space are not subject to this limitation.
A3: If you are using a dynamicly linked executable then the required plug-in modules, such as 3D renderer, 2D driver, etc. usually must reside in the same directory. On BeOS, the plug-in modules must be located in an `add-ons' subdirectory. Most ports of Crystal Space use plug-in modules, with the notable exception of the DOS port which is statically linked.
A4: Are you certain that you are trying to load the correct map file? If you are running the application from the command-line, then you can try specifying the map file on on the command-line, like this:
% walktest flarge |
Where `flarge' is the name of the map file you wish to use. In this case, `flarge' corresponds to the `flarge' directory which is included with CS. Also note that `flarge' itself requires the file `stdtex.zip' which contains all the textures.
Alternately, for WalkTest, you can change the `WorldFile' setting in its configuration file `CS/data/config/walktest.cfg'. For example:
Walktest.Settings.WorldFile = flarge |
A5: If all else fails ask a question on the Crystal Space mailing list. See section 1.6 Mailing Lists.
A: There is a lot of documentation available. Not all of it is completely up-to-date but we try to do our best in keeping it as up-to-date as possible. Refer to the section in the Crystal Space manual which discusses documentation resources. See Documentation Resources.
A1: You may want to decrease the size of the texture cache with the `-cache=<size>' command-line option or the `CACHE' configuration option in `soft3d.cfg' if you are using the software renderer. By default the size of the texture cache is quite large (typically 5 to eight megabytes in size), so adjusting this value might be useful for low-memory systems.
A2: Using a smaller window size and a lower bit-depth can also decrease memory usage. In addition to the memory used for the actual graphics display, Crystal Space uses a Z-buffer containing 4-byte values with the same dimensions as the display. Therefore, a display with dimensions of 640x480 uses a Z-buffer of 1,228,800 bytes.
A3: If you are still low on memory there is only one thing you can do: decrease the complexity of the map. For every polygon in the world a lot of memory used. If you just want to try the engine you can run Crystal Space with some of the simpler worlds such as `perf.zip' or `rgb.zip'.
A1: Crystal Space is a 6DOF engine. It needs to do semi-perspective correct texture mapping to get a nice display and calculations to achieve this are slow. You can expect that Crystal Space will probably need the same kind of computer as a game such as Quake 1 or Quake 2, at least a Pentium or a very fast 486 with a floating point co-processor. Also note that Crystal Space is still in the developmental stage and has not yet been fully optimized. You might try using smaller window dimensions with the `-mode=' option. See section 3.1 Common Command Line Options.
A2: Use a hardware accelerated graphics card and driver. Such cards are quite popular these days and can perform extremely well, especially when compared to Crystal Space's software renderer.
A1: The palette does not really matter because Crystal Space calculates its own optimal palette given a set of input textures. But there are some things to keep in mind. Try to get the number of different colors as low as possible without sacrificing for quality and if you design a set of textures that are meant to be used together it is always best to let them use a similar palette. This will make it easier for Crystal Space to calculate a good palette.
A2: The width and height of a texture must be a power of 2 (such as 8, 16, 32, 64, ...). That's about the only restriction. Textures need not be square. You can have textures with sizes like 16x256. If a texture does not conform to the above mentioned limitations then it will be scaled. This may mean that there is quality degradation though!
A3: Crystal Space textures may be in any of the supported image formats, such as PNG, TGA, BMP, JPG, and GIF.
A4: Unless a texture is not meant for tiling you should make sure that it can be tiled. This means that if you put a number of textures next to each other or above each other the boundaries should seemlessly integrate with each other. Of course, it is entirely possible to create textures that are specifically drawn for untiled usage. An example would be a texture representing a computer keyboard.
A: Have a look at the section of this manual about contributing to the project (see section 9. Contributing to Crystal Space), and take a look at the To-Do and Bug lists on the Developer's Project page at SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/crystal/
You can also contact the mailing list (see section 1.6 Mailing Lists) in order to coordinate your efforts with those of other people.
A1 If you want to know how you can use CS, you can look at the chapters describing the libraries of which CS consists, See section 6. Libraries. Or you can look at the plug-ins, See section 7. Plug-In Modules and Drivers. If you want to know how it works internally, See section 8. Internal Project Structure.
A2: Read any other documentation related to this project as mentioned earlier in this FAQ.
A3: If you need more information, you should consider posting your queries to the Crystal Space mailing list, 1.6 Mailing Lists.
A1: The ultimate purpose of Crystal Space is that it will become a useable and powerful engine for writing games and other graphics visualization programs. As a project which is still under development, it may be simple or difficult to build your particular game, depending upon your specific requirements. One way to improve the state of Crystal Space so that it better fits your needs is to contribute to the project yourself.
A2: Crystal Space is under the LGPL licensing policy so you can make commercial or shareware products using it. For more details about what you can and cannot do, see the license, 1.12 GNU Library General Public License.
A: The API which you can find in the 0.90 release should be about 95% stable as compared to the 1.0 release. After 1.0 we will make sure to keep backwards compatibility (until we release 2.0 :-)
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