Battle for the Ring is another game about the Middle Earth story. It is heavily based on Mike Singleton's War in Middle Earth series, available on PC and other platforms. For a reference video, watch the following YouTube movies:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt8HyMZFalQ
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRgYua3R98Y
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzOkwnsF4Po
Definitely, we would like to clone many details of this great game, including its atmosphere, strategy game type, nice graphics, but we would like to add some enhancements: network game for two players, even better graphics and sound, and maybe more. It is important that we want a non-violent friendly game without any blood and frightening parts.
At the moment graphics is borrowed from several third party artists. Most artwork has a confirmed copyright (making the graphics available for free), but if you feel any artworks here illegal to use, please report it and we will substitute it with another file. Currently the images are static, but we may change them to animated ones.
Battle for the Ring is written in Python 2.7 and PyGame. It can be played with two players on two different computers. Another computer ("the server") is responsible for the fair play. Why Python? Well, this is easy to learn for newcomers, and it is cross-platform enough. (Another option would be HTML5 canvas.)
The server will store the gameplay data in an SQL database. Maybe there will be performance issues on a slow server, but we hope there will be no big issues. If yes, we can build up a memory based data storing for the hot data, and only on save/load will the data be saved into the database.
Clients will communicate with the server on a pre-defined protocol via HTTP(S).
On Ubuntu Linux 11.04, the python2.7 and python-pygame packages are required. For editing the source code, any editor can be good enough.
On Windows, download the following pieces of software first:
- http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.3/python-2.7.3.msi
- http://pygame.org/ftp/pygame-1.9.1.win32-py2.7.msi
The version number for Python is important: don't use any newer versions (it will not work properly with PyGame, and it is also important not to install the 64 bit version of Python since PyGame requires the 32 bit version.)
For editing the source code, Notepad++ is suggested:
During installing Python and PyGame, please choose the "Install for all users" option, and also enter that PyGame should be installed for "Python from another location: C:\Python27".
At the moment one can try the scrolling of the Middle Earth map by using the arrow keys or the mouse (by pointing and clicking on the small black arrow-like triangles), and view the initial amount of soldiers .
Please feel free to join and contribute.
Authors (at the moment): Zoltan Kovacs kovzol@matek.hu and Benedek Kovacs.
Battle for the Ring Copyright (C) 2012 The BftR Authors
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.