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CPSC 414 Assignment #3 README                                   April 10, 2004
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Author: Malcolm Liu


Assignment Description
======================

This assignment is a simple 3d shooting game. The goal is to kill as many
zombies as possible and to stay alive. You score points for killing zombies,
but the more zombies you kill, the tougher the new zombies become. 
Some of the graphical features this game includes are:
    - Jointed, animating, texture mapped meshes.
    - 3D outdoor terrain.
    - Ray intersections against deformable meshes.


Running under Linux
===================

- Run 'make' to compile the project.
- Run 'game' to begin the game.
- Or, run 'game 1024 768 fullscreen' to run in fullscreen mode, for example.


Game Controls
=============

* Player Controls *

Left-click on ground                    Move to clicked location
Left-click on zombie                    Shoot at zombie
Right-click on ground                   Shoot at ground
Right-click on zombie                   Shoot at zombie

* Camera Controls *

Hold middle mouse button +              Rotate camera
  move mouse
Arrow keys                              Rotate camera
Page Up                                 Move camera closer, smoothly
Page Down                               Move camera farther, smoothly
+                                       Move camera closer, stepped
-                                       Move camera farther, stepped

* Miscellaneous/Debug Controls *
R                                       Restart Game
Esc or Q                                Quit Game
P                                       Pause Game
T                                       Show/hide last clicked point
I                                       Toggle invincibility
'?'                                     Show/hide frame rate
S                                       Show/hide skybox background


Gameplay Tips
=============

- Your character tries to shoot as close as possible to the location you click
  at the time you clicked there. If the target moves away from that location
  you will probably miss. Its easiest if you try to aim for the middle of a
  zombie's chest.

- You inflict extra damage if you hit a zombie in the head.

- Moving the camera to a better position can make aiming easier. Its easiest
  to aim at a zombie that is facing directly toward or away from the camera.


Compilation Notes
=================

- Compiling with Visual C++ 6 Debug configuration will result in many warnings
  about debug information being truncated. These warnings are due to Visual
  C++'s STL implementation, and can be safely ignored.

- Visual C++ 6: Please be sure to use the 'Release' configuration, which 
  includes optimizations for best performance.


Known Bugs
==========

- In Linux, there may be an occasional a segmentation fault during the game.
  (Although I think I fixed it).

- There is no player-to-zombie collision detection.

- It is possible to stand in locations on the terrain where zombies cannot
  hit the player (due to differences in height).

- Performance is fairly poor. The program does not make effective use of 
  rendering hardware, e.g. by using hardware vertex buffers.


Credits and Acknowledgements
============================

Uses GLM 1.2 - a matrix/vector math utility library by Markus Ilmola
- http://markus_ilmola.tripod.com

Contains implementations of intersection algorithms described in 
"Real-Time Rendering" by Thomas Moller and  Eric Haines (ISBN: 1-56881-101-2)

Meshes and animations created using Milkshape 3D 1.7.0 by chUmbaLum sOft 
- http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/

Human reference images obtained from
- http://www.josh.ch/joshch/tutorials/milkshape,modelling-human-leg.html

Makes use of some textures from Paul Bourke's texture library
- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/texture/

Additional texture work by Helen Wong - whylala@hotmail.com

Skybox background textures created using Terragen 
- http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/