Billiards 0.4.1 Copyright (C) 2005-2012 Dimitris Papavasileiou <dpapavas@gmail.com> Introduction ============ Billiards is a free simulator for the game of billiards. It can be used to practice eightball, ninball and carom billiards on your own or against your friends. It is also designed to be customizable enough to allow one to tailor the simulator to his needs (to implement new games for instance or to study the physics of the game by fiddling with the physical properties of the equipment, setting up shots or plotting ball trajectories, velocities and spin). As a game Billiards is currently fairly stable and complete. It features most of the effects one encounters in a real billiards table. You can apply english, knock balls off the table, perform masse shots by elevating the cue and even miscue. These features are not `imitated' by, for example, artificially curving the path of the cue ball when the cue is elevated. They are a result of the physics model employed by the simulator. This leads me to believe that this model is fairly accurate although I'd love to hear from more experienced players on the subject. The only flaw I can see in the model so far is that it doesn't allow you to jump the cue ball by elevating the cue and using bottom english. This is due to the fact that all objects in Billiards are considered completely rigid I believe. The elasticity of the cue tip should be taken into account to get jump shots to work and elasticity may play an important role in other cases like ball-cushion collisions as well. I'm not sure if ODE has enough support for flexible bodies to correctly implement such effects though. This needs to be further looked into. Also be warned that billiards is designed to be a billiards simulator not a `video game' in the usual sense. Upon running it you get a table and a cue and you can start playing straight away with the default configuration and without having to get past a bunch of pesky menus. I expect that most people will use it for practice so that, most of the time, one will play with the same configuration. This configuration should therefore be set once and for all (or once and for long at least). Some settings (the number of players, or game type for example) will probably change more often and for these there are command-line switches to set them on the fly when loading Billiards. You can, nevertheless, still use a GUI if you prefer. It is probably more convenient when experimenting with different values for the various parameters or when changing options on the fly. In these cases you can load your favorite browser after you've started billiards, connect to http://127.0.0.1:29176/ and use the pages you'll find to set up new games or control the current game. Alternatively you can start Billiards through the command billiards-browser which will start Techne's very own browser and point it to the correct url. System Requirements =================== In terms of hardware you'll generally need a GPU with decent OpenGL support. It should support GLSL shaders (the GL_ARB_shader_objects, GL_ARB_vertex_shader and GL_ARB_shader_objects extensions) framebuffer objects (GL_EXT_framebuffer_object) and vertex buffer objects (GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object). These capabilities are common even among cheap and relatively old GPUs so that I consider it reasonable to use them as a bare minimum (alas, supporting old hardware through multiple code paths is a nightmare and Billiards, or rather the system it runs on, is already complicated enough for one person to handle). There's also a plain-GL cel shaded codepath which doesn't use the GLSL and framebuffer object extensions (and it can be made not to use vertex buffer objects as well) and this is the only way to go for ATI users I'm afraid (let me know if I'm mistaken). If someone can help in getting the GLSL shaders to run on ATI hardware let me know. This codepath could actually also be used to run the game on older hardware although that'll require some changes to the code to get it to compile on such systems. I'll look into it if it gets requested by users. Installation ============ Billiards is implemented on top of Techne, a general purpose, programmable physical simulator and renderer so make sure you've installed Techne before trying to install Billiards. You can get it here: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/techne/ Other than that Billiards also requires the Lua 5.1 compiler. The file INSTALL contains generic information on how to configure, compile and install Billiards. Generally after unpacking the tarball and changing to the created directory you should enter: ./configure make as usual. Then type: sudo make install to install the game. If all went well you can run the game by typing: billiards at the command prompt. If you get shader errors or segmentation faults try: billiards -Otoon instead. Bugs ==== Please report any bugs (and you'll probably encounter lots of them) at the project's home page at : http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/billiards License ======= Billiards is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. See COPYING for details. The manual is distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See the appendix for details. All Lua scripts found in the scripts/imagery, scripts/meshes and scripts/polyhedra directories and their subdirectories are image data or geometry data and are distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See the appendix in the manual for details.
