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<file title="User levels">

  <chap title="A piece of advice">
    <text>
      You can use your own levels whith Liquid War 5.
      The only thing you have to do is to put your own 256-colors vbitmap files
      in a special directory, and the program will use them.
      Currently, BMP, LBM, PCX, and TGA files are supported.
      It is a good thing to use 256 colors bitmaps,
      for they waste less disk space than truecolor bitmaps,
      and Liquid War 5 converts all bitmaps to 32 colors bitmaps.
      Additionnally, truecolor bitmaps might cause the DOS version
      to crash randomly...
      2-color bitmaps will also cause the program to crash.
      I warned you!
    </text>
    <text>
      The best thing you can do to create your user levels
      is to have a look at the few user files I put in the .zip file
      and try at first to do something that looks about the same!
    </text>
  </chap>

  <chap title="Maps">
    <text>
      Liquid War 5 does many checks on user levels
      and is much safer than Liquid War 3.
      Still, try and help the program not to crash, if possible.
    </text>
    <text>
      Liquid War considers that dark colors are walls
      and bright colors are associated to the playable area.
      So you can draw your walls in black, dark blue, etc...
      And the rest of the map can be of any bright color
      such as white or yellow.
    </text>
    <text>
      You can draw a small map on a big bitmap,
      as long as you use a bright background color.
      Liquid War will autodetect the range of your map
      and add the border line if necessary.
    </text>
    <text>
      Liquid War re-orders all the maps,
      so that the smallest ones are on the left
      and the most complicated ones on the right
      when you choose them with the slider
      in the "map" menu.
      So if you can't find the map you just draw,
      don't worry, it is probably just mixed with
      the levels from the .dat file.
    </text>
    <text>
      The default path for maps is "custom\map\" on windows, and
      "/usr/local/share/games/liquidwar/map" on GNU/Linux.
    </text>
  </chap>

  <chap title="Textures">
    <text>
      All you have to do is put a bitmap in the default directory
      which is "custom\texture\" on windows, and
      "/usr/local/share/games/liquidwar/texture" on GNU/Linux.
    </text>
  </chap>

  <chap title="Textures">
    <text>
      As of Liquid War 5.6.x, it's possible to associate a map with
      a texture. All you need is to call the maps with the same name
      (case is important, lowercase recommendend...). Look at the
      "meditate" custom map which is shipped with Liquid War for
      instance.
    </text>
    <text>
      This also works with internal builtin maps (those stored in
      the datafile) so for instance if you name a custom texture
      "world1.bmp" it will automatically be associated to the builtin
      map world1 (to figure out internal names you have to unpack
      the source distribution and look in the ./data directory).
      This also works the other way, if you name a map "wood2.bmp"
      it will be automatically associated with the builtin texture
      wood2.
    </text>
    <text>
      Associating a texture with a map requires more work than
      designing a simple map, but the results is usually much
      nicer. See the "Kasper - ..." series of maps for instance.
    </text>
  </chap>

  <chap title="Send your levels">
    <text>
      Maybe you will find that the original levels are ugly and unplayable.
      Well, if you have made user levels and think they are great,
      just send them to the Liquid War user mailing list.
      Please use only 256 colors bitmap and zip them before sending them,
      or else they might be blocked by my provider...
    </text>
    <text>
      As of today, dozens of user maps have already been included
      in Liquid War, this is very nice for it happens that every
      map designer has his own personnal tastes, so the maps all
      look different.
    </text>
    <text>
      Still, to be included in Liquid War's mainstream distribution,
      your maps will need to be placed under the terms of the
      GNU General Public License, or at least a compatible license.
      You should have received a copy of this license with Liquid War
      anyway. Read it 8-)
    </text>
    <text>
      Of course, you can use *any* map when playing. You can even
      play with a bitmap you got from a proprietary source - such a
      proprietary game you bought for instance - but the point
      is that I can't - and you can't either - distribute such a map
      along with Liquid War.
    </text>
    <text>
      However, this is enough legal boring stuff! What you should keep
      in mind is that I'm always happy when I receive maps from
      players, and it's a pleasure for me to include them in the
      mainstream distribution.
    </text>
  </chap>

</file>
