Alien Arena 2011
Version 7.53
1. Scope
This document includes information about the GNU-Linux/Unix
version of Alien Arena 2011. Custom options and other
information specific to Alien Arena are included here.
For general information, licensing, and contributers, see the
README.txt and license.txt documents (in the docs/ subdirectory
in the distribution archive).
For generic information about installation, see the GNU INSTALL
document.
2. Resources
The Alien Arena HomePage URL is:
http://red.planetarena.org/
There are links there to the Alien Arena Forum and other helpful
Internet resources. The Alien Arena IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
channel is now served by:
irc.planetarena.org
The in-game IRC connects to #alienarena there.
There is a Server Browser on the Web at:
http://chaingun.org/alienarena/tools/browser/
There is a Subversion (SVN) repository for Alien Arena. See the
topic "Getting Alien Arena from SVN" below.
3. Changes for version 7.53
The Autotools build uses autoconf 2.68, and automake 1.11. The
m4 macros are updated and configure.ac modified accordingly.
There are no major changes to the build procedure from earlier
7.5x versions.
The complete version 7.53 changelog is available at:
http://icculus.org/alienarena/changelogs/7.53.txt
Following are some highlights.
Visual and performance improvements:
* Significant performance increases on high settings from extending
implementation of VBO (Vertex Buffer Objects).
* IQM and MD2 model rendering improvements.
* Grass/vegetation rendering improvements.
* Model precaching improvements.
Game-related updates:
* New CTF map based on dm-zion2k9: ctf-zion2k9
* New TCA map, tca-invasion, derived from ctf-invasion using new
entity definition feature.
* Improvements to bot AI navigation, aiming and movement.
* CTF scoring improvements.
* Speed-hack detection (sv_enforcetime) improvements.
* Optional player lights ("DM Lights") for non-team games.
Other:
* Additional video resolutions in menu and other menu additions.
* Player password account system and statistics improvements.
* Client to server packet rate limit lowered to approx. 60 pps.
See the section "Notes about Console Variables" below. There are
some new and changed "cvars".
4. Some previous version changes affecting build and install:
* The Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) is integrated with the main program;
so libode is, optionally, not required. ODE is written in c++, so g++
and libstdc++ are required to build and link the integrated ODE.
* A configure option to disable document installation was added.
* An installation path for the icon, icondir, was added and the icon
was renamed to alienarena.png.
* The server terminal may be configured to support color output.
* The dedicated server was renamed to crx-ded.
* The game.so shared library and LIBDIR variable were eliminated.
5. Requirements
Alien Arena uses OpenGL for 3D graphics rendering. Not all
computers have 3D acceleration hardware and drivers with adequate
performance for 3D game play. While some systems may perform ok
with open source drivers, a proprietary driver, such as those
from AMD/ATI and NVidia, is often needed. The Video Settings
menu may be used to override the automatically selected
performance level.
Online performance will vary depending on the network connection
between the client and the server. Servers with *lower* ping
will usually perform better.
Playing online may require firewall configuration.
These ports are used by the program:
* UDP 27900 for the master server. Used for getting server list.
* UDP 27901 for the client.
* UDP 27902 for account/stats system password validation.
* UDP 27910 is the default for a server, but is often configured otherwise.
* TCP 6667 is the default for in-game connection to the IRC channel.
The cURL library is used to retrieve map resources, player
ranking information, and current version information from these
URLs:
* http://icculus.org/alienarena/sv_downloadurl
* http://stats.planetarena.org
* http://red.planetarena.org/version/crx_version
6. Installation
If you are installing Alien Arena using your distribution's
package manager, follow their instructions. Distributions
install the user's configuration in places other than the default
"~/.codered" directory. This is important if you want to create
the "arena/autoexec.cfg" file to customize your settings. Search
for "arena/config.cfg" to find the configuration directory.
Two installation alternatives are PlayDeb and Desura. If using
those, follow their installation procedures. PlayDeb is at
http://www.playdeb.net/. Desura is at http://www.desura.com/.
The version available with a distribution or the game
distribution services may not be the latest.
If you are reading this, you may have already unpacked the
distribution archive (aka, "tarball") into your HOME directory.
Otherwise, the terminal command line for unpacking the archive
is:
$ tar -xzf alienarena-<some version numbers>.tar.gz
Or, using the graphical file browser, right click on the file
name, and left click on "Extract Here." Then follow the
instructions below to build the program.
If the installation fails, check the error message for required
software packages that may be missing. Alien Arena uses: X11,
OpenGL, OpenAL 1.1, Ogg-Vorbis, cURL, FreeType2, and JPEG. Some
major distributions have "dev" versions of the libraries that are
needed to build programs. These are not installed by default, so
you may need to install them using your distributions package
manager. Version 7.53 does not require the ODE library (it is
integrated). There is a configure option to use the system ODE
library (see below.)
For Ubuntu and similar systems, see the topic, "Getting Required
Packages with Synaptic", below.
For advanced configure options, see the topic, "Custom Configure
Options", below. It is not necessary, but it would be a good
idea to take a look at those.
Using the terminal, change to the "alienarena-7.53" directory and
enter these commands:
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
To run:
$ crx
In the menu, Single Player will run a simple pre-configured local
game. For more single player options, go to the Host Server
menu. Setting "public server" to no will keep your local game
from being broadcast with the master server list. For
multiplayer, online play, first enter your player name and a
password in the Player Setup menu. Then go to the Join Server
menu to find a Server. (Yes, we know the menu system needs
updating and there are plans to do that.)
Command line options to crx are NOT standard. There is NO
"--help". They follow a format inherited from Alien Arena's
Quake 2 roots. Command line options are the same as console
commands using a '+' character prefix. The details are beyond
the scope of this document; but a simple example is:
$ crx +set maxclients 10
By default, 'sudo make install' will install the game programs
and data like this:
/usr/local/
bin/
crx
crx-ded (dedicated server)
share/
alienarena/
arena/
botinfo/
data1/
doc/
alienarena/
<various documents>
icons/
alienarena.png
When the program is run, a directory is created in the user HOME
directory. Various kinds of data (config files, downloaded data,
custom bot setups) are written there. The default directory name
is ".codered/". That can be changed using an environment
variable, COR_GAME.
For example:
$ export COR_GAME=/home/user/.alienarena
Current settings are stored in ".codered/arena/config.cfg". For
custom settings, create a file, ".codered/arena/autoexec.cfg".
Details about settings are beyond the scope of this document. Go
to the websites, the forum and the IRC channel for more
information.
Following installation, intermediate files generated by the build
may be removed using:
$ make clean
To uninstall the program and data that 'sudo make install'
installed, run:
$ sudo make uninstall
The uninstall procedure may not remove all files and directories.
Some manual removal may be required.
7. Getting Required Packages with Synaptic
Tools and packages required to build Alien Arena may not be
installed. For Ubuntu and similar systems, installing them is
easy with the graphical Synaptic Package Manager. Select the
following packages. Other packages that these depend on will be
automatically selected for installation. This list is based on
Ubuntu 10.10.
build-essential
libx11-dev
libgl1-mesa-dev
libxxf86vm-dev
libxxf86dga-dev (optional)
libopenal-dev
libjpeg8-dev (or libjpeg62-dev)
libvorbis-dev
libcurl4-gnutls-dev
libode-dev (optional)
libfreetype6-dev
8. Notes about Console Variables (cvars)
New or changed server cvars:
* sv_enforcetime - setting to 1 enables speed hack
detection. (May give false positives.)
* skill - for bot skill. setting to 3 forces all bots
to skill level 3.
* insta_rockets - a game mode combination of Instagib
and Rocket Arena.
* g_dm_lights - 1 enable, 0 disable DM Lights.
New client cvars:
* gl_usevbo - enables the use of Vertex Buffer Objects
for better performance.
* cl_dmlights - 1 enable, 0 disable DM Lights when
enabled on server.
Alien Arena is based on Quake games. Many of the cvars are the
same as Quake 2. More information can be found on the Forum and
on the Web.
9. Troubleshooting and Configuration Tips
When the game program exits, it stores settings in "config.cfg".
The default location for this file is
"/home/<user>/.codered/arena/", but it might be elsewhere
depending on your distribution. Sometimes it helps to delete
config.cfg, and then re-enter menu settings. For persistent
storage of custom settings, create a file named "autoexec.cfg" in
the same directory as "config.cfg". Settings in "autoexec.cfg"
will override settings in "config.cfg".
If the game does not run smoothly, graphics settings may need to
be adjusted. Also, a different or updated video driver may be
needed. Enable the video frame rate display in the "Game
Options" menu by setting "display fps" to yes. There are
settings in both the "Game Options" and "Video Options" sections
that affect performance. The maximum frame rate is set with the
console variable ("cvar"), "cl_maxfps". Sometimes lowering that
from the default "90" will help. Get more information on the
Forum, Websites, and IRC channel.
If you have errors that output messages about "ODE", setting the
"ragdolls" option to off in the Game Options menu may help.
There are known sound problems related to PulseAudio and OpenAL
with some versions of those sound drivers. Check for for
information on OpenAL configuration using "~/.alsoftrc" in your
distributions shared doc directory.
If you have a high resolution mouse, you may need to set the
mouse sensitivity cvar. The cvar name is "sensitivity" and it
may be set to fractional values between 0.0 and 1.0. Use the
console to determine the value, then put it in autoexec.cfg.
The mouse may behave badly (always pointing up, for instance).
This can usually be fixed by setting the console variable (cvar),
"in_dgamouse", to zero. Put this line into the "autoexec.cfg"
file:
set in_dgamouse "0"
Alternatively, when building the program, use this configure
option:
--without-xf86dga
For advanced users (if you do not know what this means, it is ok
to ignore it): Testing shows that some CFLAGS settings can give a
little performance improvement. Add CFLAGS="<put options here>"
to the ./configure command. Some to try, depending on system
hardware are:
* -O3 (-O2 is the default)
* -march=core2 or -march=native
* -msse, -msse2, -msse3 or other sse options, and -mfpmath=sse
If you modify CFLAGS, you probably also want the "--disable-
silent-rules" configure option.
10. Custom Configure Options
Run './configure --help' for a list of options. Note that many
of the options are built-in and some are not meaningful or useful
for Alien Arena. Options are entered on the command line in the
usual way; the help output has the details. Refer to the GNU
INSTALL document for general details.
To build the dedicated server only, use the following configure
option:
--disable-client
By default, configure produces a status message giving
information on the configuration. To hide that message, use:
--disable-build-status
To rename the programs, use the standard configure option. For
example:
--program-transform-name='s/crx/alienarena/'
To install to a different location, use the standard configure
option. For example:
--prefix=/usr/local/games
To specify an installation location for the icon, use the
following option.
--with-icondir=DIR
To use the system-supplied libode, rather than the integrated
ODE, use this option:
--with-system-libode
Due to variations in the way libode may be built, this is may not
work. It may be preferable to use the system library, however,
if it was built with double precision math. If 'pkg-config
--cflags ode' returns -DdDOUBLE, it is probably safe to use the
system library. The integrated ODE is built using these compile
options:
* -DdDOUBLE
* -DdTRIMESH_ENABLED
* -DdTRIMESH_OPCODE
* -DNDEBUG and -DdNODEBUG
Using a libode built with -DdSINGLE makes ragdolls excessively
"raggedy". Other libode build variations will likely result in
program failure.
To disable installation of documents, use the following option.
--disable-documents
The server terminal will output color if the following option is
used. This converts Quake-style color codes to ANSI color
escapes. (It is not enabled by default because some terminal
configurations may not support ANSI color escapes.)
--enable-ansi-color
Other Alien Arena custom options are intended mostly for
developer use. If you use them, it is assumed that you know what
you are doing.
11. Tools
Tools/fuse.tar.gz contains a game server browser. See documents
in that package for details.
Tools/LinuxScripts contains tools for server management. See the
README there for details.
12. Alternate Install
This configures the installation to use the "traditional", single
directory, in-place install. It does not define DATADIR, and the
executables need to be in the top game directory. Normally, this
install would be done somewhere in your HOME directory. Root
privileges would not be required to write the game data. The
configure option for renaming of the executables is not
supported.
If you are a map-builder, you should use this option. Some
mapping tools may not work with the "standard" install.
If you regularly update to the latest development code from the
Subversion Repository, you may prefer this option.
The two install methods are not mutually exclusive. With some
care, it is possible to use both.
The configure option is:
--enable-alternate-install
Following the usual 'make', it requires
$ make install-alternate
This just copies the executables to the top game directory. The
effect of using any other 'install' make target is "undefined".
13. Getting Alien Arena from SVN
The repository has the latest development version of Alien Arena.
It contains tools and other resources that are not a part of the
regular distribution.
The SVN repository may be browsed at:
http://svn.icculus.org/alienarena/trunk/
Anonymous read-only checkout is available using this command:
svn co svn://svn.icculus.org/alienarena/trunk alienarena
More information about Subversion may be found at:
http://subversion.apache.org/
