Crates!

1. INTRODUCTION
----------------

Crates  is  a  three dimensional puzzle game. It consists of mis-
sions that consist of levels. To  pass  a level,  you  must  move
player  to  the  exit  by interacting with the different kinds of
crates in the level.  Before that you must also collect  all  the
keys and toggle all the toggles that the level might contain. Ev-
ery level has a password that makes it possible to continue play-
ing  from  that  level  whenever you want, but if you want to get
your name in the hall of fame, you must play the whole mission at
one  go. On that case, the faster you are, the better is your po-
sition in the hall of fame.

Crates is  extensible,  meaning that  it  can  be  extended quite
easily with new missions, levels, game entities (crates) and game
states.  All the missions, levels, game entities, game states and
configuration of the  game engine  are  implemented as plain text
Lua-scripts.  So,  if you know  Lua, you can modify or write  new
missions,  levels,  game entities  and  game states with any text
editor, without any development tools.  Crates is also skinnable,
meaning that you can change the look and feel of the game (or the
theme of the game) easily in the configuration file.   New  skins
(themes), can be created with any image editor and added  to  the
game  just  by   dropping  them   in   new  subdirectory  to  the
resources/textures-directory. Crates is also relocatable, meaning
that it  (the directory containing the game and resources) can be
moved to new location and/or used without installation;  it  will
always know where it is and find the resources it needs.

Crates is controlled with a keyboard or a gamepad. Passwords  can
be written faster with the alphanumeric keys of the keyboard or a
little slower by using the D-pad of gamepad to select the letters
one at a time.  The default buttons of the gamepad and many other
settings of the game can be changed in a configuration file  con-
fig.lua in the resources-directory of the game. Sound effects are
disabled as a default, and if you want to enable them you can  do
it  by changing setting config.sounds from false into true in the
configuration file. See the configuration file for the other con-
figurable settings.

Player is moved around with a keyboard or a gamepad. It continues
movement until something stops it. It can be moved only  when  it
is  not  already moving - you cannot change player's direction if
it is moving. If nothing stops it, it will fly out of  the  level
and the level is restarted.


2. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
-----------------------

    - GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X or FreeBSD
    - 3  MB free hard disk space
    - 17 MB free RAM available
    - Accelerated graphics hardware
    - Sound card
    - Keyboard or Gamepad

Game is currently tested only in Ubuntu GNU/Linux, Arch GNU/Linux,
Windows XP, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. Other versions might come later.
For Windows there is an installer  available  that  installs  and
uninstalls  a binary version  of  the game  automatically.    For
GNU/Linux,  Mac OS X  and  FreeBSD  there isn’t currently such an
installer (might come later),  so in these systems game needs  to
be compiled  from  the  source  code using CMake (cross-platform,
open-source build system). Install it first, if you don't already
have it. It can probably be installed with your  system's package
manager,  or you can get  a binary version  or  source code  from
http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html.  Then install
development versions of the latest  stable versions  of   SDL 1.2,
SDL_mixer 1.2,  libpng,  zlib  and Lua 5.1. Then use CMake and the
provided CMakeListst.txt to build crates.  Note  that   in-source
builds are not allowed.   See  file  INSTALL  for  more  thorough
explanation.


3. CONTROLS
------------

Game is controlled with a keyboard or a gamepad. The default con-
trols are listed below. The default buttons  of  gamepad  can  be
changed in the configuration file.

  Keyboard          Action          Gamepad
  ------------------------------------------
  Esc      Exit to previous state   Button-9
  Return           Accept           Button-1
  R            Restart level        Button-10
  Arrows            Move            D-pad (also sticks)


4. FURTHER INFORMATION
-----------------------

The man-directory contains one or more manuals that can be useful
for  GNU/Linux, Mac OS X  and FreeBSD users. The crates  homepage
www.octaspire.com/crates/  contains  also more  information.  You
might find there  new missions, extensions and other  new content
for crates also.


5. CREDITS
-----------

Crates is written in the programming languages C and Lua. It uses
SDL,  SDL_mixer,  libpng, zlib and OpenGL. Sound effects are made
using ZynAddSubFX Software Synthesizer and Audacity.  Some of the
graphics are made with GIMP and some with Inkscape.  Textures are
drawn/edited  with  GIMP.   The background image used in menus is
created and rendered with Blender.  Some of the textures  contain
(possibly  modified) parts from the public domain Blender Texture
Disc.  The image for the font texture is generated  automatically
with  a  Java  program.     Textures   for     the   Waymark-skin
(resources/textures/waymark)  are  based  on  free  game graphics
(Sinistar.zip) released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
License at lostgarden.com.   Textures  in  the  Waymark-skin  are
modified versions, not the originals. See lostgarden.com for  the
originals:     "Iron Plague, a Sinistar clone" art by Daniel Cook
(Lostgarden.com).  Music  is  by  Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed      under      Creative    Commons    "Attribution 3.0"
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/  and  was modified by
downsampling it and converting it to Ogg Vorbis file format using
Audacity.