“The Castle" is a first-person shooter style game in a dark fantasy setting. Your main weapon is a sword, so the fight is mostly short-range. 3 main levels included, packed with creatures, items and sounds.
Also a couple of bonus levels are available, for fun and to show off some engine features. In particular, there's the classic DOOM E1M1 level — I know you always wanted to have a sword and a bow in DOOM :)
Requirements to run:
At least 512 MB RAM is recommended. Fast and stable OpenGL is also needed (read: good graphic card with up-to-date drivers). The game was tested with various graphic cards and OpenGL implementations: NVidia, Radeon with closed drivers from ATI and open-source ones, Mesa OpenGL also works (although pure software Mesa will usually be too slow).
History and plans:
This game was initially developed for PascalGameDevelopment competition. It was at the beginning of 2006, in the time where our engine didn't even have a version number yet :) (So, it was before 1.0.0 engine release.) A new game, that actually uses the current capabilities of our engine (thousand things were developed since 2006 — new graphic effects, new ways to be interactive / animated etc.) is planned.
Download "The Castle", version 0.9.4:
See news for the list of changes since last release.
This is free software, so if you're interested you're also welcome to download game sources (from this page, grab engine sources + castle sources). The castle sources contain all the Pascal sources, Blender models, Makefiles, GIMP xcf files, etc. needed to develop the game. To compile, you will also need to download engine sources. See here for more info about compiling.
2.1. Installing
- Linux, FreeBSD: To hear game sounds you should first install OpenAL and vorbisfile library. If installing the older OpenAL Sample Implementation from Loki be sure to install also libvorbis-dev package (i.e. with developers symlinks) too (otherwise SI reports that vorbis extension is present, but will fail to use it). This problem is not present with newer OpenAL-Soft, as it doesn't have vorbis extension and we will use our own handling then. If you don't want to hear sounds, you don't have to install OpenAL. Installing actual game: extract the downloaded archive anywhere. Run the game by running the binary, like ./castle. If you don't want to always run the binary from the game's directory, you can also extract the game (or make a symlink to extracted dir) to $HOME/.castle.data/, or /usr/local/share/castle/, or /usr/share/castle/. You can then move or symlink the binary castle to any place you like (e.g. $HOME/bin or /usr/local/bin).
Detailed requirements.
In short: good graphics card, with good OpenGL drivers installed. In case of doubt, be sure to install newest drivers from your graphics card manufacturer.
Also you should have enough free memory available when running the game. As of version 0.6.3, game can take up to 280 MB on GeForce with Linux drivers from nvidia.com. But this may depend on various factors, including your OpenGL implementation. If the game seems to drain your system of all the memory (which will most likely be observed as sudden slowdown in the middle of "Loading creatures" sequence, as this is the main memory-eater) you can
- Try closing all other programs before running the game (although a decent OS should send them to swap anyway...)
- Lower the setting "Creature animation smoothness" in "Video options".
Library requirements:
- OpenGL
- Libpng, Zlib (under Windows appropriate DLL files are already included in program's archive, so you don't have to do anything)
- OpenAL and OggVorbis (VorbisFile and dependencies) libraries are strongly suggested if you want to hear sound (under Windows appropriate DLL files are already included in program's archive, so you don't have to do anything)
- Mac OS X users should look at the list of dependencies on Mac OS X
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