BugLord for Palm OS Overview -------- An original real-time strategy game of entomological combat, BugLord pits armies of bugs against each other in a struggle for survival. The player commands a diverse colony of insects, from simple worker ants to mortar- firing beetles, and fights to conquer as much territory as possible. In this world, only the strong will survive, and the dominant army feeds off the spoils of war. To be victorious, players must wage war on multiple fronts, and an ever-evolving enemy is sure to keep things challenging. All the elements of classic real-time strategy games are available to explore: resource management, army building and tactical combat strategy. Players will explore rich forests, vast deserts and bubbling swamps as they conquer territory and fight to keep it. Palm OS Device Requirements --------------------------- Because BugLord is extremely graphically and CPU intensive, we recommend only running BugLord on a device that meets the following minimum configuration: - 66 MHz CPU or faster - 16MB of memory - Palm OS 4.0 - At least 4 MB of free RAM BugLord will run on some devices that do not meet the minimum requirements, but it will not run at full speed. BugLord is not supported on devices that do not meet the minimum requirements. Installation ------------ Required Files: BugLordDemo.prc The main BugLord application. MathLib.prc Standard MathLib for Palm OS. Install only if you don't have it installed already. BugLordMaps.pdb Mission map data. *** This file must not be installed on a memory card. *** Optional Files: BugLordSoundsOS5.pdb High quality sound effects for Palm OS 5 devices. Install this file if you have a device that runs Palm OS 5 and is not a Sony device, except for the Clie UX50. BugLordSoundsSony.pdb High quality sound effects for Sony devices. Install this on all Sony devices, including ones running OS 5, except for the Clie UX50. Support ------- For customer support, please contact us via the support link on www.BugLord.com. Thanks for purchasing BugLord! The BugLord Team www.BugLord.com Release Notes for version 1.05.0036: This release has MAJOR improvements to the game. We focused on stability, reducing memory usage, and the overall performance of the game. Most significant (other than eliminating most of the Fatal Exceptions people were seeing) is the Dynamic Pathfinder Tuning. Below is a list of the major items that went into this release. Many minor changes/fixes/improvements are not listed. - Dynamic Pathfinder Tuning - In this release the pathfinder will tune its performance based the specific device it is running on. This means if your device has a 400MHz CPU you will get better pathing performance than a device with a 66MHz CPU. This will show up as faster unit response to your movement and attack commands as well as an overall feel that the game's speed has significantly improved. - Fixed a frame rate management issue that showed up mainly on Tungsten C devices where the frame rate could be locked at either a very high value or a very low value making the game unplayable. - New 2D accelerated blitters. The main benefit is a reduction in the frame rendering times of up to around 50% (even more on certain devices). - Fixed screen rendering problems on the title, mission, and other screens where the entire screen or portions of it might not be properly displayed or updated. - More efficient random number generator. - Updated the Unit AI to take advantage of the new random number generator, increasing the AI's speed. - Reduced the run-time memory requirements of all animations. The objects controlling the animations now use the minimum amount of memory required for animation management. - Improved low-memory condition detection during resource/image/animation loading and at run time. You will get a pop-up message if there is not enough memory available to load a resource or if there is not enough memory available at run time. - Fixed handling of Palm OS event messages that might pop up during a game (alarm dialog, etc). - Significantly improved memory management performance. - Added ability to use all available device memory on devices with large amounts of memory. - Proper handling of OS 5 high density screen coordinates. - Fixed a crash relating to Palm OS 5 sounds. - Fixed a bug where the Sony sounds might not report that they were finished playing. This would have resulted in the sound "going out" on Sony devices. It thought it was still playing sounds when it really was not. - Improvements to the serial number input field including adding the ability to select text with the stylus, and support for hardware keyboards. Some Sony devices may have problems with keyboard support. - Fixed several bugs in the help and mission screen scroll bars where in rare cases they would get stuck, not scroll down 100%, or not update properly. These would result in the player not being able to read all of the help/mission documents. - Fixed minor memory allocation problems that would have resulted in a Fatal Exception or an automatic reset of the device. These would only have happened in low-memory conditions, which would normally only occur later on in a game. - Improved 2D bitmap graphics primitive speed resulting in additional improvements to the frame rendering speed above those improvements seen from the new 2D blitters.