                                BattleBall 2.1
                  A 3D single/multiplayer game for X Windows
                                      by
                               Philip A. Hardin


How to play
===========

BattleBall is essentially the game of soccer, played with military
vehicles rather than with people.  Each player drives a tank or flies
a helicopter, and tries to move the ball down the playfield to the
other team's goal.  In BattleBall, the teams' "goals" are their
headquarters buildings, positioned at the ends of the playfield.
Hitting another team's headquarters building with the ball scores a
point, knocking the building over in the process.  Yes, realism was
my ultimate goal in this game.

Players are organized into teams.  Up to six teams can play at once, and
teams may have any combination of human and computer players.  All teams
compete on the playfield simultaneously.  To reduce disorientation and
chaos, players' vehicles are painted with their team's colors, and
headquarters buildings are marked with their team's insignia.

Vehicles are, of course, armed with cannons, but these are primarily a
means to an end.  Gunfire is good for forcing obstinate opponents out of
your way, but gunfire doesn't destroy anything.  Gunfire is also good
for blasting the ball across the playfield and into your opponent's HQ.

-Scoring-

When there are two teams, scoring is the same as it is in soccer:
scoring a "goal" is worth 1 point.  When there are more than two teams,
scoring a goal earns 2 points, and the other teams besides the losing
team receive 1 point each for defending their headquarters.

-Controls-

BattleBall is played with keyboard controls, which are shown in the game
window.  If the window isn't large enough to show them all, "more->"
appears at the edge of the window, indicating that the window can be
resized to show more controls.


Command-Line options
====================

Run the game with the flag "-help" to see all the command-line options.


OpenGL / Xlib rendering
=======================

As of version 2.1, BattleBall supports an OpenGL rendering mode.  See
the -gl command-line option.  Xlib rendering is still supported, and
continues to be the default rendering mode.  Be forewarned that the
OpenGL mode has a few visual artifacts, and will probably be slower
than Xlib on systems without hardware-accelerated OpenGL.


About the application
=====================

BattleBall runs under X11 Windows, and uses X11 to open game windows on
multiple machines.  This has a couple of implications.

First, even though BattleBall is a multiplayer game and can be played
(very) short distances over the internet, it runs as a single process
on one machine.  That one machine has to do almost all the work to
render a 3D scene in each game window.  In other words, the game runs
*slow* with too many human players!  There are several things you
can do to get more speed out of the game:

o  open game windows on machines other than the machine running the game
o  use the -id option to lower the inter-frame delay
o  turn off shadows
o  turn on "simple" graphics
o  use smaller game windows
o  use wireframe rendering

Second, the machine on which BattleBall runs must have "permission" to
open windows on the other machines where the game will be played.  The
"xhost" command gives this permission.  Type "xhost +" in a Unix shell
on each machine where you plan to play the game.  Otherwise, you may
see an error message like "cannot connect to X server so-and-so" when
you try to start a multiplayer game.


Copyright
=========

BattleBall 2.1 is copyright (c) 1999 by Philip A. Hardin.

BattleBall 2.1 is released under the terms of the GNU General Public
License.  See the file "COPYING" for details.

BattleBall comes with NO WARRANTY, not even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  Hey, it's free...
if you have to be told it doesn't come with a warranty, you're a
[insert mild derogatory name here] !!!


Web Page
========

Binaries and source code are available from the BattleBall web page
at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/pahardin/bb.html.
