ULTIMATE WARRIOR DEMO Copyright AD Studios 1995/1996 ------------------------------ Disclaimer Background and contact info. Minimum Specs. Running the demo. Configuring. Performance. Specifications. Tech Specs. IPX Network Game. Keys. Moves. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer. We do not accept responsibility for any damage or problems cause by this demo directly or indirectly. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Background. Although the code engine is nearly complete, as a demo, there are many parts of the game missing, mainly in the graphics department. The full specs for the final game are given at the end of the demo. Unless a publisher does comes forward to offer backing, this game will never be complete. So enjoy the demo, and use your imagination to fill in the gaps. 'AD Studios' are working on new projects, and are in the process of looking for a suitable publisher for future work. If you wish to contact us, you may reach us via email : 'dani@londonweb.net' Or visit the Ultimate Warrior Web site at http://www.londonweb.com/users/dani/ Your comments and suggestions are welcome. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minimum Spec. PC Compatible Pentium 60mhz or above. SVGA Local bus graphics card. Vesa 2.0 Compliant Graphics Adapter or emulator. 8mb Ram. Dos 6.22 or Win95. 10Mb HD Space. Sound card compatible. Microsoft compatible mouse. Joystick and Joypad compatible. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Running the Demo. 1. If you have a graphics card with hardware VBE 2.0 support such as the 'Matrox Millenium' you will not need a VBE 2.0 software driver. If your card does not support VBE2.0 in hardware (you can check by attempting to run the demo) then you must obtain Scitech's UNIVBE/DISPLAY DOCTOR driver. This is a shareware 21 day evalutaion package available from 'www.scitechsoft.com'. Although this may be inconvenient, it gives 100% (hopefully) compatibility for the SVGA mode required (640x480) and also allows the use of a linear virtual frame buffer for optimum performance. 2. Make a directory on your hard disk for the game. 3. Unzip the demo into that directory using 'pkunzip -d warrior.zip'. BE SURE TO USE THE -d SWITCH. 4. If you only have 8mb be sure to remove smartdrive. Also remove any other memory hungry drivers. Although there are no minimum requirements for base memory, the game will need most of the high(XMS) memory on an 8mb machine. 5. Ensure that you have a mouse driver loaded. 6. If you are in windows then please shut it down. If you are in windows 95 the shut down to MS-DOS. Do not use an MS-DOS shell, it may not work at all for the 'setup', and performance may be reduced for the game. 7. If you have a gravis ultrasound run 'loadpats' from the promt. 8. If you have a sound card installed run the 'setup' program to configure it. 9. Run warrior by typing 'warrior' at the prompt. 10.If you do not have a sound card, or do not want any sound, run the game by typing 'warrior nosound' at the prompt. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Configuration Notes. RAM Ultimate warrior requires the full use of 8Mb. Please ensure that you run the demo from the native dos prompt (NOT in a windows shell), and if you only have 8mb, that smartdrive is removed. This is because smartdrive uses a chunk of memory for its cache, and the game needs a full 8Mb. If you have more than 8mb of ram, you will probably not need to remove any drivers, and may even be able to run the game under a win95 dos shell, however performace may be reduced, so it is not recommended. VESA VBE 2.0 In order to maximise SVGA compatibility (the game runs at 640x480), a graphics card which supports VBE 2.0 is required. If you are unsure about your graphics card (most dont support VBE 2.0 in hardware) then you should obtain a copy of the 'scitech univbe driver' available from www.scitechsoft.com. The game will not run without a VBE2.0 driver ! SOUND Most sound cards are supported by Ultimate Warrior thanks to the HMI sound operating system used (www.humanmachine.com). If you are using a gravis ultrasound you will need to run 'loadpats.exe' before you attempt to run the sound 'setup.exe' or warrior. If you are having problems getting the demo to run, and believe that it may be due to your sound card, try running warrior with no sound by typing 'warrior nosound' at the prompt. The midi music for the game was specifically written for the AWE32, if you have a lesser sound card, you may wish to turn it off through the options on the main menu screen. MOUSE DRIVER You will need to have a mouse driver loaded in order to run this demo. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Performance. Peformance can differ fairly drasticaly on different machines. High end 486's may run slowly, while high end pentiums may run the game too quickly. When the game initially starts, the game will automatically time the refresh rate and attempt to set the speed and some of the options to attain a good game speed. However, the options screen allows some degree of flexibility in setting up the graphical detail. The most important setting is the speed, the fastest setting is '5', and the slowest '1'. Speed '5' doesnt actually wait for the vertical refresh, this means that it is the fastest setting, however on some graphics cards it may cause the screen to flicker severely or tear. If you are experiencing this problem, you should lower the speed to '4'. This should only marginally reduce the performance, but will cure the problem. If you the game still runs far too quickly, you should try a lower setting such as '3'. As yet we havent seen a system which is so quick that you will need a lower setiing, but '2' and '1' are there considering the fast increases in CPU power. (In the game you can use F7 to F10 to change the speed from '2' to '5' respectively) If you are running at maximum speed and the game still runs slowly there are some other graphical details which you should turn off. First try turning off the background animations (In the game you can use F5 and F6 for this). If the game still runs slowly the next option to remove is the parallax scrolling (from the options menu only). Finally you could try turning the shadows off although this has been found to make only a small improvement. If you have turned all these options off and the game still runs slowly you are probably running a low end 486 or below which is below the minimum spec ! Alternatively you may have an old ISA graphics card, this game really requires a fast graphics card which is at least VESA Local Bus. When you first play the game, it may appear to be unresponsive to key presses. Infact this is not the case. When you first start playing you may be frantically pressing keys which does not fit with the timing structure imposed on the moves. In order to smoothly execute one move after the other you must get the key press timings right. This takes a little time to learn but makes the game more enjoyable in the long run. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Specifications. GAMEPLAY 10 Warriors 6 Different weapons each. Separate head-body-leg armour and hit logic. Weight, Strength and Speed characteristics with realistic effects. Combo type attacks with extreme violence Monetary strategy for buying armour/weapons and characters. Manage a team of 4 characters. Network support for multiplayer tournaments (Max. 4). Desperation and Instant death moves. 2 Button Joystick and gamepad compatibility. Neural Net based AI GRAPHICS SVGA (640x480x256) Graphics (VGA Optional) Large sprites Approx. Character head to toe height 180 Pix. 500-600 Frames of animation per character. Real time sprite data decompression. Fast smooth animation (20fps on Local Bus 486) Motion captured 3D sprites (manually enhanced). Superb Special effects. 10 Backdrops (640x480x110). Fully rendered cinematic sequences and cut scenes (640x320x256). SOUND 10 epic music tracks (GM). Music link to game status. core sound effects (22Khz,8 Bit Mono) Individual sound effects for each character. Real time stereo panning for digital effects. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tech Specs. Ultimate Warrior uses VBE 2.0 to interface with all SVGA video cards. Vesa 2.0 not only gives a universal standard for selecting the correct screen resolution, but it allows the use of a linear frame buffer. Some video cards support a linear frame buffer in hardware, others dont. Vesa 2.0 makes up for those that dont by using a virtual linear frame buffer, although not quite as fast as a true linear frame buffer, it does offer 100% compatible emulation. The most interesting aspect of this game is the real time lossless sprite decompression algorithm. Most 2D PC fighting games run at a resolution of '320x200' pixels. Ultimate warrior uses '640x480' pixels, which requires four times the memory. It takes a pentium to shift and parralax the background smoothly, and although the sprites may look smallish, infact they are huge. Each characters sprite stands around 200+ pixels high. On screen they look a reasonable size (please dont say they look too small), however if you were to use sprites that large on a '320x200' screen, the would be taller than the screen itself. That gives you an idea of just how large they are. Because the sprites are so large (in pixels anyway), each frame takes up about 4 times more memory that a sprite from most fighting games. But to make matters even worse, we wanted to make the movement to look very smooth. In order to do this we increased the number of frames each move requires, and increased the frame rate at which they are displayed. A typical fighting game may have uses between 4-8 frames per move. This always makes the momement look so blocky and unnatural. Ultimate warrior uses an average of about 15 frames for each move ! The uncompressed image data for each character rendered from ALIAS amounts to around 22Mb. A combination of compression algorithms squash this down to about 1.2Mb without any loss in detail whatsoever. The 40:1 compression ratio is achieved by tailoring the compression algorithms to sprite type data. More importantly, before the sprites are displayed they must be uncompressed, and quickly. Overall, the decompression algorithm is so fast that it only takes a relatively small amount of CPU time to perform this task. Another key feature is the ability to choose your own weapons and armour for each character. We developed a precomposite sprite function which uses a set of 18 character renders for the different configurations of body armour and renders the current weapon in real time. One of the reasons we could not distribute this in the demo is that each character takes around 50mb of 'CD-ROM' space. This allows you to customise your character, each of which have over 100 different possible combinations. Different weapons affect the 'reach' and power of your shots, and different armour affects the effectiveness of blows to you. Furthermore, using different weapons and armour changes your weight, which affects the speed of your character. So you must balance the most effective items with each other. All this is made more interesting by the introduction of 'gold'. You collect gold by winning it in bouts, and you then have to decide which items to buy. Obviously, the more powerfull items cost more money, so it becaomes another resource which you have to balance. One feature which has not yet been completed is the opposition AI. At the moment, your computer oponent is not to difficult to beat. We are in the process of developing much more intelligent AI routines which learn from its mistakes and from your successes. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- IPX Network Game Ultimate Warrior supprorts a 2 player game across a LAN using IPX. If the code seems a little 'flakey' it may be because it was a rush job. However, it appears to be reasonably stable on the few systems we have tested it under. First of all, it is up to you to get your machines configured for the IPX protocol. You must use DOS drivers such as the ones that come with 'Novel Network'. If you can already play other DOS IPX network games, then this one should also work. There are two potential problems, firstly, this game uses the same socket number as DOOM, so it isnt advisable to run DOOM or any other program that uses the 'DOOM' socket while running an IPX game. Also, it may not be advisable to try running more than two IPX games. If a third or fourth person tries to 'join in' for any reason, the demo may crash completely. The main benefit of using the IPX network to play a game over a lan is that each player has their own keyboard, eliminating the key lock out effect that occurs when too many keys are pressed at the same time. Known IPX bugs: * If one player exits warrior completely, the other will need to exit before restarting. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Keys Player 1 Insert - Button A Home - Button B Up cursor - Up Down cursor - Dow Left cursor - Left Right cursor - Right Player 2 'q' - Button A 'w' - Button B 'f' - Up 'v' - Down 'c' - Left 'b' - Right Esc - Quit bout F1 - Screen shot F5 - Background anim off (usually increases speed) F6 - Background anim on F7 - Speed 2 (slowest) F8 - Speed 3 F9 - Speed 4 (fastes with sync) F10 - Speed 5 (fastest, no sync) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Moves Each character has a fairly wide range of moves, combos and special moves. More may be published on the web page in the near future. Here are a few interesting ones to get you started. All characters -------------- Back,Forward,B - Decapatate Back,Forward,A - Impale Back (walk back) - Block Down+Back - Crouch Block Raul (The character with no armour on, has the most moves!) -------------------------------------- Left + Down - Roll Left + Down,A - Roll with slash Left + A - Stab Aslan & Trog (other 2 characters) ------------ from standing: A,A,B,A+B - Combo A,B,A,A+B - Combo Forward,Forward - Roll from crouching: Down+A,B,A,B,A+B - Combo Down+A,B,A,A+B - Combo In the air: Down+B - Overhead attack Back - Block