Liquid War (v5.6.1) - 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. Additionnally, truecolor bitmaps might cause the DOS version to
  crash randomly... 2-color bitmaps will also 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 checks 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.



Textures
========


  As of Liquid War 5.6.x, it's possible to associate a map with a texture. All
  you need is to call the maps with the same name (case is important, lowercase
  recommendend...). Look at the "meditate" custom map which is shipped with
  Liquid War for instance.

  This also works with internal builtin maps (those stored in the datafile) so
  for instance if you name a custom texture "world1.bmp" it will automatically
  be associated to the builtin map world1 (to figure out internal names you
  have to unpack the source distribution and look in the ./data directory).
  This also works the other way, if you name a map "wood2.bmp" it will be
  automatically associated with the builtin texture wood2.

  Associating a texture with a map requires more work than designing a simple
  map, but the results is usually much nicer. See the "Kasper - ..." series of
  maps for instance.



Send your levels
================


  Maybe you will find that the original 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, or else they might be blocked by my provider...

  As of today, dozens of user maps have already been included in Liquid War,
  this is very nice for it happens that every map designer has his own
  personnal tastes, so the maps all look different.

  Still, to be included in Liquid War's mainstream distribution, your maps will
  need to be placed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or at
  least a compatible license. You should have received a copy of this license
  with Liquid War anyway. Read it 8-)

  Of course, you can use *any* map when playing. You can even play with a
  bitmap you got from a proprietary source - such a proprietary game you bought
  for instance - but the point is that I can't - and you can't either -
  distribute such a map along with Liquid War.

  However, this is enough legal boring stuff! What you should keep in mind is
  that I'm always happy when I receive maps from players, and it's a pleasure
  for me to include them in the mainstream distribution.

