Shogo: Mobile Armor Division Demo (Linux)

Shogo: Mobile Armor Division Demo (Linux)

The Linux demo for Monolith’s popular Shogo: MAD, a first/third-person mecha shooter, offers players the chance to take the role of Sanjuro in his battle against Gabriel and The Fallen.

System Requirements

Pentium 200 MMX with 3D hardware, or a Pentium 2 233 for software-only (Pentium 2 plus 3D hardware recommended)

32 MB RAM (64 recommended)

90 MB of free disk space

Linux Kernel version 2.2.x or later (glibc 2.1)

XFree 3.3 or later (XFree 4.0 recommended)

OSS/Alsa compatible sound card (/dev/dsp style)

SDL version 1.1 (library included)

FreeType Engine version 2 (included in this archive)

gtk 1.2

Installation

Change to the directory where you want the demo to reside (i.e. your home directory), and run the installer:

sh ShogoDemo.run

This will create a directory named ShogoDemo.

Running the Demo

To run the Shogo demo, change to ShogoDemo. Then, type ./shogo to start. This will bring up the launcher front-end, where you can configure Shogo for your system. Note that the demo always pops up this launcher, while in the full game, you can instruct not to pop up after the first run.

The first thing to do would be to select the video mode you want to use: Bring up the video settings by clicking on the side tab Video. You can choose between software-only rendering, and hardware accelerated OpenGL. Click on one of them, and select the resolution in the list. If you want to play full screen, check the the option labeled Run Fullscreen by default. You can toggle from window to fullscreen mode later during the game by pressing the fullscreen toggle key (see Default keyboard mapping for details).

On the Sound page, you can select the number of sounds you want to use simultaneously, as well as the quality. If you check the Low sound quality option, 8 bit sound will be used, while high quality sound uses 16 bit. The default number of voices is 16, which is enough for most situations. However, the more voices you set here, the more impact the sound will have on your frame rate. On low-end machines, it is recommended to set this to something lower, like 8. Values over 16 are not needed.

The Advanced page let's you set some of the more advanced options. Clicking the Disable Sound option will completely disable the sound output. Disable Music and Disable Movies are not used in the demo and are only relevant for the full game (which will feature CD music). Disable Lightmapping will disable the light maps; Shogo will use vertex lighting in this case, which doesn't look as good, but will speed up the frame rate on slower hardware. Disable Model Fullbrights will simplify model rendering by not drawing "glowing" sections of models. This will speed up model rendering on some machines.

Some hardware may have troubles with OpenGL accuracy, resulting in small gaps between polygons. Checking the option Enable Polygap fixing will try to prevent this, at the expense of a slightly slower frame rate. Enable Singlepass Multitexturing will try to use single-pass lightmap rendering. This will speed up the game considerably, and should always be checked. If no multitexture support is found in the OpenGL driver, it will not be used, so it's safe to turn this option on.

Finally, there's a string widget at the bottom that can be used for directly passing command line arguments to the game. This can be used for giving the name of the OpenGL library to use: -gllibname

. The default is to use libGL.so. Note that this can also be set with an environment variable (see Environment Variables). The checkbox below the string widget will instruct the launcher to always use this option when starting Shogo.

When you're done, press Launch Game to start.

Playing the Demo

Once in the main menu, you can change some options in the options menu, like sound volume, keyboard mapping, mouse mapping, and detail levels. The default is high detail, so if you'd like a lower setting, go to options->display (with cursor up/down, and enter) and select the appropriate detail by highliting the detail settings and pressing curor left. Pressing escape brings you back one level in the menus. Now, select Single Player or Multiplayer, and have a go.

Known Problems and Hardware Issues

Mouse input under XFree 4.0.1: XFree 4.0.1 seems to have introduced some problems with the mouse input that was only corrected in the latest version still in the CVS. If you use the 4.0.1 release version, you may experience jumpy mouse movement. This is not a bug of Shogo, and will probably vanish with the next XFree release.

Joystick support: There's no yoystick support yet in the demo. It will be available in the full game.

Fog: Fogging is currently only available if your OpenGL driver supports the GL_EXT_fog_coord extension. If this isn't present, fogging is turned off. The final version will fix this.

Speed on GeForce graphics boards: The game was extensively tested on the nVidia GeForce. Unfortunately, the latest driver release 0.95 introduced a slowdown for some people. If you have those issues, you might consider going back to the 0.94 release. NVidia is aware of this, and working on it.

Sound: On some hardware, you might have problems with occasional "clicks". This seems to be caused by certain combinations of graphics and sound hardware. Unfortunately, no fix is know as of today.