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# User levels

## A piece of advice

You can use your own levels whith Liquid War 5. The only thing you have to do is to put your own 256-colors vbitmap files in a special directory, and the program will use them. Currently, BMP, LBM, PCX, and TGA files are supported. It is a good thing to use 256 colors bitmaps, for they waste less disk space than truecolor bitmaps, and Liquid War 5 converts all bitmaps to 32 colors bitmaps. 2-color bitmaps will probably cause the program to crash. I warned you!

The best thing you can do to create your user levels is to have a look at the few user files I put in the .zip file and try at first to do something that looks about the same!

## Maps

Liquid War 5 does many checking on user levels and is much safer than Liquid War 3. Still, try and help the program not to crash, if possible.

Liquid War considers that dark colors are walls and bright colors are associated to the playable area. So you can draw your walls in black, dark blue, etc... And the rest of the map can be of any bright color such as white or yellow.

You can draw a small map on a big bitmap, as long as you use a bright background color. Liquid War will autodetect the range of your map and add the border line if necessary.

Liquid War re-orders all the maps, so that the smallest ones are on the left and the most complicated ones on the right when you choose them with the slider in the "map" menu. So if you can't find the map you just draw, don't worry, it is probably just mixed with the levels from the .dat file.

The default path for maps is "custom\map\" on windows, and "/usr/local/share/games/liquidwar/map" on GNU/Linux.

## Textures

All you have to do is put a bitmap in the default directory which is "custom\texture\" on windows, and "/usr/local/share/games/liquidwar/texture" on GNU/Linux.

## Send your levels

Maybe you will find that my levels are ugly and unplayable. Well, if you have made user levels and think they are great, just send them to the Liquid War user mailing list. Please use only 256 colors bitmap and zip them before sending them, for I sincerly don't want my provider's mail server to explode. If I get enough new user levels, I will try and include them in the next release of Liquid War.

This documentation is also available on: www.ufoot.org/liquidwar.