------------------------------------
Wizard Duel 2 - Questor's revenge.

(c)2003 Ben Woodhouse

Release 7

Date 03/05/03
------------------------------------


Entry for the GameDev.net Four Elements 3 Contest 2002 (came 2nd out of 42 
entries)


Overview
--------
You control a wizard, your aim is to kill your opponent with the four spells 
at your disposal. 

This is the sequel to Wizard Duel, my Four Elements 1 entry. The concept 
is based on the original, but apart from a few hundred lines of code, 
the engine has been almost completely rewritten, and the gameplay has 
been redesigned.


In-game help
------------
Gameplay notes, including controls and tactics, can be found in the in-game 
help. Press F1 during the game or go to help on the main menu to access it.

To access the main menu, press escape at any time. 


Requirements:
-------------
Recommended spec:
A 600MHz machine, preferably with a geforce or higher. 64MB RAM, 32MB texture memory.

Minimum spec:
Depends how much of a masochist you are. The second test machine was a 300MHz AMD K6-2 
with a TNT, and it ran very slowly (not quite unplayable, but almost) at 19fsp. By 
contrast, on an Athlon 800 with a Geforce 2 Pro, it got around 100fps most of the time.  

Notes:
Uses the NV_TEXGEN_REFLECTION and TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_EXT extensions if supported by the 
hardware, otherwise reverts to shere environment mapping. If the sea doesn't look quite
as pretty as it might, this is why. 

The game was designed to run in 32-bit colour, but it was also tested in 16-bit colour,
so it should work in that mode too, but it'll look ugly. Set your desktop display depth
to 32-bit to fix this. 

I recommend turning off fast mipmap filtering in your display settings unless you 
have severe speed problems. 

CPU speed will help a lot, since a large amount of calculation goes into animating 
the sea and drawing the dynamic lights.


The Elements
------------

EARTH
  The Quicksand spell 
  The island, trees, boulders.
  
WIND
  The Tornado spell, which also causes the sea's waves to become larger. 
  
FIRE
  The Fireball spell. 
  Caution: Wizards are flammible and should not be exposed to excessive temperatures.
  
WATER
  The sea.
  The Flood spell.
  

Multiplayer
-----------
If you have a LAN or internet connection you should be able to play multiplayer Wizard 
Duel 2. 

To host a multiplayer game, go to the multiplayer menu, select your connection type 
(either LAN or internet) and click "host game" on the host machine. The game will commence 
when an opponent joins the game. 

To join a game, select your connection type, then click "join game" from the menu. 

INTERNET PLAY
To join a game over the internet you will need to know the IP of the host. This must be 
specified in the config.cfg file under the serverip attribute. 

To host an internet game, you won't need to specify the opponent's IP. 


Can't get the game to work?
---------------------------
To play this game, you need hardware OpenGL support.  

The game is designed to detect OpenGL extensions and only use them where available. 
However, it may not work if you don't have the lastest OpenGL drivers. In particular,
if you don't have the ARB_MULTITEXTURE extension, the game will fail. 

Generally problems of this nature are caused by poor OpenGL support in hardware. Most 3D 
cards, work fine, but some integrated chipsets have notoriously bad OpenGL support. 

Changes
--------
Changes since Release 6:
  -Internet support added 

Changes since Release 5:
  -Bug fixed: game crashed on machines without sound cards  
  -Lines on edge of skybox no longer visible on ATi cards

Changes since Release 4:
  -Major tornado physics bug fixed (players should no longer shoot into the 
  stratosphere on slower machines)  
  -Quicksand now creates an explosion   
