Silicon Castles
===============

(C) 2001 David Given & others
(See the in-game credits for the full list)
The author may be contacted at dg@cowlark.com

'Full Disclosure' Version 1.0

When these notes were written
-----------------------------

0100 GMT, 15 Nov 2001.

State of mind
-------------

Tired.

What you need to build
----------------------

Unix.

VBCC with the Z-machine patch. This is available at:
	http://plover.net/~hjalfi/debian/vbcc
Installing the Debian package is recommended.

A working Z-machine interpreter. Some versions of Nitfol & Zip have bugs that
cause the game to fail; Frotz is known to work. See castles.inf for more
information.

A working version of Inform & the Inform library. The stock version has some
bugs that may cause problems. The branch overflow warning patch is recommended,
as is the input buffer overflow patch; the constant folding patch is required.
The Inform patch page can be found here:
	http://homepages.tesco.net/~roger.firth/patch.html

awk. This is used to massage various data files.

How to build
------------

The MSCP chess engine uses a look-up table to determine initial moves, known as
the opening book. Stock MSCP loads this from a file. It is possible to build
_Castles_ so that the data that would normally be in this file is built in to
the image.

Unfortunately it takes about a minute for the Z-machine to parse all this data.
As a result, the game can use auxiliary files to save the parsed data to disk.

To further speed things up, it's possible to build _Castles_ so the preparsed
data is included directly in the game. In order to do this, a saved version of
the data must exist.

So, to build the fastest version of the game with a new version of the book:

1. Build with slow-book support.
2. Run the game. Save the data when prompted.
3. Rebuild with fast-book support.

The slow-book version will only reparse the data if an auxiliary file cannot be
found. For your comfort and convenience, a pre-built one has been supplied, so
you can proceed directly to step three.

To change the fast/slow settings, edit the top of the Makefile. You may also
need to tell the makefile the name of the book's auxiliary file. (The Makefile
is set up for Frotz.)

License
-------

This software is distributed under the GNU Public License. See COPYING for the
full text.

