http://www.atgp.com
To: Whom it may concern (probably you!)
From: Stephen Clarke-Willson
Date: Monday, January 06, 1997
Re: CyberDome Notes
Overview of the game:
- 8 training levels
- 64 game levels
- 7 kinds of enemy ships - NOTE: each one of the approximately
450 enemy ships is individually tuned
- 5 weapons
- Heat seeking missile - tracks into enemy ship if within a
certain, large distance
- Laser - more powerful than missile but requires direct hit
Laser and missile quantity is unlimited (displays as 999)
- Flash bomb - more powerful than missile but requires near-direct
hit
- MIRV - Multiple Independent Retargetable Vehicles - splits
into four missiles when close to an object or after a short time
- Smart Bomb - launches out and then destroys everything on
screen
- 5 powerups
- All power-ups are wire-frame - but note some hardware cannot
display wire-frame so power-ups might appear solid.
- Partial Shield (green wire-frame sphere) -increase by 25%
Total shield is limited to 999%
- Full Shield (yellow wire-frame sphere) - increase to 100%
or 200%
If player ship is at 99% or less, player ship is set to 100%;
If player ship is at 100% - 199%, player ship is set to 200%.
- Cloaking (blue wire-frame sphere)- enemy ships are not aware
of location of player ship
Enemy ships also do not avoid player ship so it is easier to accidentally
run into enemy ships. Lasts 20 seconds.
- Invulnerable (magenta wire-frame sphere) - enemy ships can
not damage player ship
Invulnerable overrides cloaking if both are picked up. Lasts
20 seconds.
- Extra ship (red wire-frame cube).
Controls:
- Keyboard controls:
- Numeric keypad:
- 1,4,7 - turn left
- 3,6,9 - turn right
- '*' - cycle through weapons
- '/' - autotarget next enemy
- '+', '-' - speed up, slow down
- INS - shoot
- Regular keyboard:
- '/', 't' - autotarget next enemy
- '=', '+' - speed up
- '-', '_' - slow down
- '*' - cycle through weapons
- CTRL, SHIFT, Space - shoot
CTRL and SHIFT ignore the "typematic" rate imposed
by the keyboard BIOS, and therefore are more responsive for shooting.
- Alt-F4, of course, exits.
- Joystick controls:
- Button 1 - shoot
- Button 2 - autotarget next enemy
- Button 3 (if present) - cycle forward through weapons
- Button 4 (if present) - cycle backward through weapons
For buttons 3 and 4, and '*' key, weapons with zero ammo are
skipped.
- Direction pad -
- forward, back - tilt down, up
- right, left - turn right, left
Configuration Editor:
- CyberDome Configuration Settings (greatly enlarged for version
1.1):
- Enable hardware acceleration - off by default, because of
the wide variety of driver bugs and implementations.
- Maximized display - off by default; the default size is a
400x300 window and works well on all P90 and above computers.
You can turn this option on or you can hit the "Maximize"
button (the little square one at the upper right) to go "full
screen" at the current resolution of the display, but the
game will still be running in a window.. On some display adapters
there might not be enough display memory to support 3D at that
resolution. If you have a 4 meg 3D board, then you can run at
800x600x16! For a 2 meg 3D board, 640x480x16 is the maximum recommended.
A P200 probably looks okay in software only at 800x600x16 and
should work on a 2 meg video board.
- "Full Screen" display - this is Microsoft-talk for
running in a mode that takes over the display of your computer
and generally eliminates Windows from interfering with the game.
In this mode, the graphics are displayed at 640x480x16 and there
is no Windows interface present. You can press Alt-F4 anytime
to exit, or use Alt-Tab to switch away to other applications.
When you return to the game, there will be a slight (one to two
second) pause while the drawing surfaces are reacquired. NOTE:
this is the only way to get 3dfx VooDoo-based boards to accelerate
the game, as they will not work in a window. If you have a 3dfx
VooDoo-based board (like the Righteous 3D) and you think the game
is running slowly, then make sure it is running "Full Screen."
- Simplified Dome - off by default; on some computers, particularly
P100 or less with some 3D accelerators, the "geometry setup
time" can exceed the benefit from the "rendering time"
increase from the 3D card. Therefore, choosing "Simplified
Dome" cuts down on the number of geometry transforms; on
the other hand, some accelerators will convert the wireframe dome
into a solid dome, which looks terrible, in which case you should
forgo this option.
- Show Starfield - on by default; same as "Simplified Dome":
turning off the starfield can cut down on the number of the geometry
transforms; also, some hardware accelerators do not support "point"
display of objects, so you may have to use this option if the
starfield displays as a solid white sphere when accelerated under
hardware.
- Use textured starfield: some hardware cannot display "point"
mode stars, but is very fast at painting textures (most notably
cards based on the 3dfx VooDoo chipset, such as the Righteous
3D). In this case, you can get an interesting looking starfield
by turning on this option; you must also have "show starfield"
turned on.
- Use polygonal explosions - off by default; the Matrox Millennium
does not support textures which are used for explosions, and so
polygonal explosions can be used instead. Also, one some computers,
there is a noticeable slowdown (a fraction of a second) while
the textured explosions are created. On these computers you might
prefer to have polygonal explosions. Game play will be a bit
snappier. Also, some hardware accelerators abort (without any
error messages) after a certain number of explosions occur; this
can range anywhere from a couple of levels into the game to over
30! If this happens to you, after you stop yelling, switch to
polygonal explosions.
- Lighted Explosions: Surprisingly, this seems to add very
little overhead and makes the area surrounding an explosion light
up when something blows up. Turning this off will speed up the
game a little bit on really slow systems.
- Use Perspective Correction - off by default; there is no performance
penalty in the "software only" version, but many 3D
accelerators slow down tremendously if this is turned on. You
give up a little visual fidelity but not much.
- Use Texture Filtering - off by default; bilinear filtering
of the textures drastically improves the explosion textures and
should be turned on if your hardware accelerator supports it.
It is off by default because it will drastically slow down the
software-only renderer.
- Remove HUD: this will remove all the game status data from
the display screen; if you are running in a window, the status
display is moved to the small area at the bottom of the window
where your current status can be read. If you remove this and
are running "Full Screen", you'll have to guess how
well you are doing, as there is no status bar present! This is
generally recommended only for very slow boards and should only
be used when in a windowed mode.
- Turn off background textures: These are the patterns or title
screens displayed behind the text (which is actually 3D, hence
the shading), and you're not missing much by turning these off.
These work fine in software-only rendering but seem to break
virtually every hardware accelerator. In fact, since so much hardware
is broken, as soon as you choose to enable hardware acceleration
(if present), background textures are turned off as well.
- Enable joystick - on by default.
- Calibrate joystick every time - on by default. If the player's
joystick is of good quality and relatively stable, then the player
can turn this off and skip the calibration stage at startup.
Note: pressing 'Skip' on the first calibration screen will also
reuse the existing settings for the joystick.
Note: if the joystick doesn't have a sufficient range of motion,
the joystick calibration screens will reject the calibration.
The player can choose "recalibrate" to try again or
'skip' to ignore the joystick altogether. Usually, the joystick
will fail to have a sufficient range of motion because the player
simply failed to move the joystick correctly, and recalibrating
will fix the problem.
- Play Startup Movie - on by default; turn off to speed startup
time.
- Enable command line options - off by default, since the command
line options aren't generally documented. Turn on to allow special
processing at startup. This is the only way to enter cheat codes.
- MIDI music - play music through sound card
- CD Audio - play music from CD, but be sure to place CD in
drive. Behavior with multiple CD drives is not defined; the player
must place the CD in the correct drive.
- No music - sound effects only.
- Save button - save settings in registry.
- Cancel button - do not save any changes in registry.
Trouble Shooting
- Explosions look like white or black squares - the video card
does not support textures (Matrox Millennium); select polygonal
explosions.
- Explosions looked okay, but suddenly look strange later in
the game: the 3D video driver is broken; select polygonal explosions.
- Explosions look okay, but after some number of levels the
game either hangs or exits without any error messages - the video
driver is broken - select polygonal explosions.
- Explosions look okay, but after some number of levels the
game gives an error message something like this: "The cooperative
level has already been set." - the video driver is broken,
select polygonal explosions.
- Background is one solid color - your driver doesn't support
either "point" display mode and therefore is displaying
the star field as one solid color; OR, your driver doesn't support
wire frame mode, and therefore is displaying the "simplified
dome" as one solid color. Turn off the star field and do
NOT use the simplified dome in this case.
- "Unable to create surface"; generally caused by
trying to run at too high a screen resolution - try 640x480x16
if you have a 2meg card and 640x480x8 if you have a 1meg card.
Note: the minimum size required for 3D acceleration is 2megs.
- Objects sometimes appear in the wrong color; this is a Direct3D
bug that shows up sometimes on 8-bit (256 color) displays. Try
to switch to 16-bit graphic mode if there is sufficient video
memory.
- Joystick disappeared - DirectX 3 installation seems to disable
joystick; reinstalling joystick driver from vendor or Microsoft
Windows 95 disk will fix it. This appears primarily to
people who are upgrading from DirectX2 to DirectX3.
- Secret method for installing CyberDome without installing
DirectX: You would want to do this when you've carefully
downloaded the latest drivers for your hardware and you don't
want the DirectX install program to change any of your settings.
Run "Setup" directly from the CD-ROM from an MS-DOS
command window, with the "-nodx" option, like this:
"C:> setup -nodx"; use this when you like the way
your system is set up (DirectX 2 or DirectX 3) and you want to
be sure that the CyberDome install does not overwrite your drivers.
CyberDome is designed to work best with DirectX3 but in limited
testing has worked well with DirectX 2 as well.
- Another way to avoid installing the DirectX subsystem:
Press SHIFT when clicking "Next" the first time (after
specifying the install directory); this will skip DirectX installation.
- To save 8 megs of disk space, it is okay to delete the opening
movie, called "startup.avi". It is not necessary to
turn off "Play Startup Movie"; if it's gone, it won't
play and no errors will be reported.
- DEBUG VERSION: If you are running the "debug" version
of CyberDome there are special options available during game play.
(Secret: You can enable the debug version by using the command
line option "-edit".) This is an unsupported features
- and if you give it a try I recommend you run in a window and
not 'FullScreen'. CTRL and SHIFT are not available for firing
weapons. If you click on an object with the mouse, the game will
freeze and then you can make modifications to the object under
the "Object" menu. To continue the game, choose "Object->Deselect".
You can alter the display properties (wire-frame, flat, gouraud)
or change the texture. Experiment. Under the "Scenes"
menu you can change various hardware characteristics. Experiment.
You can hit "i" (lower-case "eye") to give
yourself weapons, and "t" (lower-case tee) to give yourself
ships. This is a completely unsupported mode.
Game notes:
- "-demo" option on command line now goes directly
to demo - for trade show use (skips all interaction except option
to run configuration editor).
- When weapon count goes to zero, the new weapon chosen is the
next available LESS powerful weapon, instead of the other way.
This way you don't accidentally use up your more powerful weapons.
- Also, the smart bomb is never automatically chosen so you
don't use it accidentally.
- There are now some command line options to aid testing or
for cheating:
- "-level xx" or "-l xx" pretends level
1 is level xx, so once you complete level 1, you will jump to
level "xx + 1".
- "-ships xx" or "-n xx" gives you xx ships.
- "-p nnnnn" gives you nnnnn points.
- "-infiniteguns" will never decrement your ammo counter.
NOTE: you still must pick up the appropriate weapon power-up
at least once before you can fire the weapon.
- "-infinitelives" will never decrement your ship
counter.
- "-invulnerable" configures the game so you will
never die. Well, almost never. There seem to be times when you
can ram into one of the star-shaped enemies and die - so be careful!
Of course, between "-infinitelives" and "-invulnerable"
you shouldn't have too much trouble.
- "-nodeath" is an earlier verision "-invulnerable"
you might want to try. Or combine it with "-invulnerable"
as this might correct the one known case where you can die. After
all, if you're cheating, you might as well cheat all the way.
- Note: press escape to skip the intro movie if you want.
Changes for version 1.1:
- New "lighted explosions".
- Runs "Full Screen" (and therefore supports 3dfx
VooDoo based cards).
- It is possible to turn off the HUD.
- There is a textured star mode (mainly for the VooDoo).
- Background textures (for dialog boxes) can be turned off (background
textures in dialog boxes broke many cards).
- You can set the difficulty level from the configuration editor
or from the command line: -easy (hits to your ship are ½
strength); -normal; -hard (hits to your ship are twice normal
strength!). -hard is very hard. For that matter, -normal is
pretty hard.
- A bug that prevented 10-button joypads (like the new Microsoft
Sidewinder Gamepad) from initializing and therefore crashed the
game has been fixed.
- The simulation is more accurate on systems with a slow frame
rate.
- The game runs much faster on slower systems (P120 and below)
when lots of bullets are present.
- There was a ship you could only kill with a smart bomb on
level 34; this has been corrected. (It was too close to the dome
and your missiles would disappear before hitting the ship.)
- The first screen used to display in two sections - the title
and then the copyright. This broke lots of hardware so everything
displays at once.
- There is a new (one second) delay between levels so the computer
voice doesn't step on her own speech.
- You can leave textures turned on but turn off separately background
textures for dialog boxes that break so much hardware. (In fact,
just enabling the hardware will do this, since virtually every
driver crashes from this. It appears to be an interface problem
in Direct3D.)
- The main dome is textured.
- You can turn on the status line and turn off the HUD (recommended
for windowed modes only) (command line: "-nohud").
- There was a very rare timing bug where you might die and see
the "Game Over" screen and then return to the game,
dead in the water. This has been corrected.
- The power-ups have all been changed to wire-frame for simplicity;
in addition, for those accelerated video boards that can't display
wire-frame, each power-up has a unique color to help identify
them if there are displayed as solids.
- Note: there is additional score information hidden in the
registry: visit HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\AtGP\CyberDome\Scores
to see more statistics on how well you've done.
3D Driver Tips:
- Many drivers arbitrarily die because of the hard work required
to show multiple textured explosions. This is severely annoying
because it results in the game locking up. To test your hardware
to see if this happens without playing the game just to see it
crash, set your hardware up to display textured explosions
and then let the demo mode run for a couple of hours. If it runs
for over two hours, then you are unlikely to have a problem playing
the entire game. The game has been tested for over eight hours
in the software mode and with the 3dfx VooDoo Direct3D driver,
so if the game dies on your driver, it is a driver bug. THE FIX:
use polygonal explosions and complain to your hardware manufacturer.
There are very few games that really stress the hardware as much
as CyberDome so encourage your hardware vendor to use CyberDome
to test their drivers. The only verified drivers that work reliably
with textured explosions, as of TODAY, Monday, January 06, 1997,
is the 3dfx driver and the built-in software drivers. Your mileage
may very as new drivers are created and released all the time.
All other drivers we've tested (S3, Matrox, PowerVr, ATI Rage
I & II) run for hours with polygonal explosions.
- Several hardware drivers refuse to run the game more than
once without rebooting the computer. This is very annoying as
you might imagine. The symptom is that you will get a "wait"
cursor when you try to run the game again, but no window will
be created. After a few seconds the "wait" cursor disappears
and that's that. There is a program called "Killhelp.exe"
which will kill off the DirectDraw helper program and let you
run again, but I'm worried that it is protected by license agreements
with Microsoft so I haven't included it. Also, you could do some
damage with it if there is more than one DirectDraw program running.
Still, you might want to hunt around on the Web for it - someone
may have illegally posted it somewhere - or perhaps Microsoft
will purposefully make it available. In the meantime, I may get
around to writing one that does the same thing, so check the Above
the Garage Productions web site from time-to-time, at http://www.atgp.com
.
- Speaking of software drivers, Direct3D comes with two: the
so-called "Ramp" or monochrome driver and so-called
"RGB" or full-color driver. The monochrome driver isn't
really just one-colored but it does use internal tables to simplify
color calculations. It is generally faster to use unless you
have hardware acceleration. This is the default case for non-accelerated
computers. If you happen to have an MMX compatible computer,
you might want to try RGB mode, which runs faster than Ramp mode
because of the use of special MMX instructions that allows the
computer to calculate the entire color spectrum (Red, Green, Blue
- hence "RGB") at once. You might also want to try
it if you have a very fast (P200 or higher) Pentium or Pentium
Pro. TO ENABLE: use the command-line prompt and enter the option
"-rgb".
- There are a number of files called "something.reg"
on the CD-ROM. These files will pre-load the registry with settings
that, at the time of this writing, given the current hardware
drivers, will enable a particular card to work with CyberDome
to the best of its ability. All you need to do is to double-click
on one of these files and the registry settings (which are what
you are editing with the Configuration Editor) will be modified
for that card. Generally speaking, the situation over time will
tend to get better, so if you like, after using one of these files,
you can use the Configuration Editor to selectively enable additional
features when you get a new driver in order to test out the capabilities
of the new driver.
- Special note on 3dfx VooDoo-based cards: This is only card,
as of this writing, that can handle the textured star field.
Amazingly, software drivers on fast machines in reasonably sized
windows (you have to test this yourself) can often display the
textured star field when an accelerated card can not. (Kind of
a bummer, eh?) The 3dfx card looks really great with the following
settings: textures on, perspective correct textures on, filtered
textures on, fullscreen (the only way it will work), hud on, show
starfield on, use textured starfield on, use high-color textures
on, lighted explosions on,
, and I think that's everything.
You might also try those settings on a P200 in a 400x300 or 640x480
window.
- An annoying trait of many drivers is an inability to gracefully
switch from an 8-bit (256 color) desktop mode to 16-bit mode full-screen
without messing up. If you think this might be affecting you,
try setting your desktop color depth to the same color depth you
want to run the game.
Game Tips:
- Overall, this is a difficult game. You can make it much easier
with the "-easy" command line option or "Easy"
choice in the Configuration Editor. If you're good - really good
- you can finish the entire game (all 64 levels) in a little over
an hour at the normal settings. Nobody has completed the game
(yet) on hard.
- Use the first few levels to master the auto-targeting. You'll
know you're good at it because you'll make it up to around level
20. Then things get harder again. At level 20 you'll have the
opportunity to start collecting lots of life power-ups. You can
collect about four extra lives in level 20. What you should do
is to collect three of them and then allow yourself to be killed.
This will let you restart the level and collect another three
lives. Do this any number of times until you feel you have enough
lives to finish the game. There are other levels with ship power-ups
(try to figure out the scenes.scw file if you want to find them
- it's a text file), but this is the easiest place to collect
them. NOTE: you'll have to give up all your hard-earned health
to do this - it's worth it.
- NOTE: editing the scenes.scw file may make it unusable!
It will certainly eliminate any possibility of customer service
from MMI!
- Save your smart-bombs for times when you just can't hack a
level.
- In some of the levels where the ships are flying very fast,
the best way to attack them is to figure out where they are flying,
and then fly the opposite direction, toward the ship. So if a
ship is flying in a circle around the dome, get a feel for the
pattern, and then fly the opposite direction. This gives you
the most time to target the ship and let loose some heat seeking
missiles, MIRVs, or bombs. (Of course, try to avoid a head-on
collision.)
- In some levels, some of the ships start out close to you,
and auto-targeting them (as in the 3rd training level)
will cause a lot of damage. The easiest way to get the situation
under control (use this in the 8th training level too)
is to hit the auto-target key or button several times in a row
- this will point you toward a ship that is far enough away from
you that you'll have some time to think about what you're doing
and usually fly you away from the nearby ships.
- Good luck!
For more information, visit the Above the Garage Productions World
Wide Web page at http://www.atgp.com.