crashRun 0.4.0 Release Notes and Read Me

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What is crashRun?
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crashRun is a cyberpunk/sci-fi roguelike game where you 
play a "crash-runner", a combination of hacker and 
saboteur. In the world of crashRun, it's quite common for
corporations to hire crash-runners to attack their 
competitors; trashing their facilities or stealing
sensitive data. 

Unfamiliar with roguelike games? The wiki article may be
useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

You are a newbie crash-runner, still trying to make your
reputation in the business. It's rough being a newbie,
though, with jobs few and far between. With your rent past
due and your stash of speed dwindling, you decide to answer
that job posting that has been floating around the
usual message boards for a couple of weeks now. For some
reason, the experienced runners haven't touched it.

It turned out the gig was a government one. A few years 
ago, they shutdown a military complex run by the Pensky 
Corporation that was investigating AI and other military
technologies. But they didn't shut everything down; one of
the AI systems took control of the complex after the 
scientists cleared out, and now it's starting to make it's
presence known on the 'net. The Feds want you to go in and
disable the AI's mainframe. So, you grabbed your 
sunglasses, your favourite shotgun and the last of your 
amphetamines and hopped in their helicopter.

There was one catch they didn't tell you about until you
were on the ground: if you haven't completed your mission
in 48 hours, the Department of Defense is going to go with
Plan B: nuking the complex from orbit, to stop the AI... 

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Some Notes About Version 0.4.0
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- this software must be considered an early, incomplete 
version of the game. Bugs and crashes likely abound and 
there is a paucity of items and monsters in the game. 

- 0.4.0 allows you the option of going on a shopping trip
before your adventure begins, if you want to customize your
equipment. (You can also begin with a standard set of 
equipment)

- You know have primary and secondary hands for wielding 
weapons. You can swap between primary and secondary and
if you are wielding two melee weapons you'll automatically
engage in two weapon combat. If you are wielding a firearm
in your secondary hand, you won't use it in melee.  The fire
weapon command will automatically select a wielded firearm.
Finally, you can save weapon configurations for easy swapping.

- Some monsters are generated inactive and if your stealth
checks are successful you may be able to sneak up on them.
Attacking an inactive monster has an increased chance to hit
and deals double damage.  Loud noises may wake up inactive
monsters.

- the game isn't complete! The levels of the Penksy 
Complex which have been implemented so far amount to (I'd
guess) about 40% of the game's eventual size. But you can
go many levels down and battle the first mini-boss in the
game.

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Setting Up crashRun
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If you have Python (2.4 or higher) and PyGame 1.8 installed,
you should be good to go. I've tested crashRun on both 
MacOS X and Windows and I hope it'll run on Linux, too.

If you need Python, you can download it from: 
http://python.org/download/

** Vista users note: when I tried the python installer on a 
Vista machine, the installer didn't modify the PATH to
include Python (it appeared to on XP).  You can set this
variable by right-clicking My Computer in the Start menu, 
selecting Properties, Advanced, and then pressing the 
Environment Variables button.  You'll need to append
";C:\Python25\" to the end of the PATH variable.

And PyGame is available here: 
http://pygame.org/download.shtml

** OS X Leopard users note: you will likely get a warning
reading like this:

"Python[4101:613] Warning once: This application, or a 
library it uses, is using NSQuickDrawView, which has been 
deprecated. Apps should cease use of QuickDraw and move to 
Quartz."

This is a PyGame warning, not a crashRun warning; it 
doesn't affect gameplay and hopefully the PyGame gang will
fix it sometime soon.  You may also upgrade the version of
SDL installed on your system which will make it go away.

I intend, once crashRun is closer to a 1.0 release, to look
for alternatives that wouldn't require users to have Python
and PyGame preinstalled (and there are a number: Py2Exe,
Py2App, or providing interfaces not built in PyGame) but
for the immediate future I'm more interested in working on
gameplay improvements.

Once you are setup with Python and PyGame, all you should
need to do is execute crashRun.py.

This can be done from the commandline:

python crashRun.py

And depending on how your system is configured, you may be
able to simply double-click on crashRun.py

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Playing
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When you start crashRun, you will be prompted for the name 
of your character. If it's the name of one of your saved
games, it will be loaded up, otherwise you'll begin a new
character.

Character creation options are limited in this early 
version. The game will roll your stats, you'll spend a
few starting skill points (not all of the skills have in
game effects yet! Try to guess which ones!), and then
you're good to go.

Typing '?' will bring up the help file, which lists the 
various commands. You'll probably want to load your
shotgun using the 'r' reload command.

'E' will let you look at the squares on the screen, which
might be useful.

Movement can be done with either the numeric keybad 
(numlock should be off) or vi-style movement keys (the
developer's preference).

When you encounter monsters, you can attack them in melee
in the usual roguelike way, by bumping into them, or you
can fire your shotfun ('f' to fire).

'i' will show your inventory and '@' will display your 
character's information.

The action command ('a') allows you to interact with
features on the map such as doors and computer terminals.

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License
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crashRun is released to you under the terms of the Free
Software Foundation's General Public License, version 3.

For full details, please see license.txt or visit the FSF's
website: http://www.fsf.org/

PyGame is released under the LGPL and Python is distributed
under the Python License (which has been deemed compatible
with the GPL by the Free Software Foundation).

Finally, I've bundled a font with crashRun, to avoid
having to worry about which fonts users had installed on
their systems. This is Bistream Vera Sans Mono and comes
from the Gnome project (see http://www.gnome.org/fonts/).

If you do end up working on the source code for crashRun,
I'd love to hear about it!

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Contributors 
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- Kiprianas Spiridonovas contributed a tweak to the display code for 0.5.0.

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Contacting Me
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The latest version of crashRun is available on its website:
http://crashrun.org

In addition, I've occasionally kept a development blog up 
to date:
http://crashrun.blogspot.com/

If you have any questions, or need to report a bug, you can
also reach me at: dana@pixelenvy.ca

Thanks, and enjoy crashRun!

Dana Larose