From LQWiki

Contents 1 Foreword 2 The game 3 Graphics and Sound 4 Screen shots 5 Installation 6 Hardware requirements/recommendations 7 External links

Foreword

Initially our intention was to clone 'Paradroid' from the C64 home computer. This we did. The result was the project "Freedroid". However, after completing this first goal, we started out on making modifications and evolving the game into an action rpg, using isometric perspective and a component system for the main character according to equipment used. Development has continued for quite some time now and similarities with the original arcade game have mostly left the game. The only remnant might be the special 'takeover' subgame, that can be used to hack hostile robots. It now can be described as a Linux Diablo clone. FreedroidRPG is cross-platform: Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD are now supported.

The game comes with a built-in level editor and item editor and dialog editor programs.

The game

FreedroidRPG is a graphical single player role playing game, that uses viewpoint and equipment system similar to the classic Diablo games. However, this is a bit more than a Linux Diablo clone : emphasis on story and dialogs is intended.

The story is very simple. In a future world, the robots that did most of the work for humans went crazy and started attacking people. Chaos throughout the galaxy ensued.

Tux, a hero of the past, has foreseen the development somehow and put himself into a stasis field to be awakened when times are dire. One of his former friends, now an old man, frees the Tux at last. This is where the game starts. The player takes control of Tux, an almost man-sized penguin often called Linarian inside the game. The must try to survive and win the trust of the nearby colony to save it from doom.

Freedroid and FreedroidRPG are free software, i.e. everything is licensed under the GPL. Comments, additions, suggestions and help are very welcome. While the story will have an end in the upcoming 0.9.13 release, we're looking forward to adding more plot and depth and features to the game.

Graphics and Sound

The game is optimized for OpenGL, so best results are reached provided that hardware-acceleration is available. However, systems without hardware-accelerated OpenGL can revert to a pure SDL output mode with will run sufficiently fast on modern machines. Use command line switch -n to disable OpenGL mode, which usually is still much faster than any software emulation of OpenGL like Mesa or some default Microsoft 'OpenGL driver' things.

Screen shots

http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=54521

http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=54521&ssid=10797

http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=54521&ssid=10796

Installation

For the installation under Linux, there are source tarballs provided, usually names something like freedroidRPG-0.9.12.tar.gz. The installation then follows the usual scheme:

tar -zxf freedroidRPG-0.9.12.tar.gz
cd freedroidRPG-0.9.12
./configure
make

and then optionally, if you are root, you can also use

make install

This last step should not be required. You can also run the game directly from your tarball directory. But then you should move into the src directory first, so type something like

cd src
./freedroidRPG

and it should work! Optionally, there are also rpm packages and maybe also gentoo packages floating around. You can find them as usual via google.

Hardware requirements/recommendations

required

Duron 400Mhz or better when using OpenGL capable graphics card

Software dependencies: SDL, SDL_image, SDL_mixer, SDL_net, libpng, zlib, libjpeg

recommended

Duron 700Mhz Duron with Geforce 4 should give very smooth behavior

External links

• The home page of the project (freedroid.sourceforge.net)
• Development pages on the Sourceforge (sourceforge.net)
• Download Page (sourceforge.net)