Aleph One/SDL 20051119

Aleph One is an Open Source 3D first-person shooter game, based on the game Marathon 2 by Bungie Software.
Aleph One was originally a Mac-only game, but there is now a cross-platform version based on the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library, that should in theory run on all systems supported by SDL (Linux, BeOS, Windows, Mac OS, Solaris, IRIX, *BSD, and others). Except for a few minor things, the port is complete and playable.
Installation
From a binary package
- Unix: If you are running Linux/i386 with XFree86 4.0 and OpenGL you can download and install the binary RPM (you will also need to install at least one of the AlephOne-M1A1, AlephOne-Marathon2 or AlephOne-Infinity RPMs). Otherwise, you have to compile Aleph One/SDL from the source (see the next section). In both cases, you have to have SDL >= 1.2.0 installed.
Note: If you are getting a message like
error: Failed dependencies:
libGL.so.1(LIBGL) is needed by AlephOne-20040417-1
while installing the RPM, try installing again with the --nodeps option. If this is the only failed dependency and you have OpenGL installed, the program should work.
Compiling from source
1. You will need to have the SDL library installed. Aleph One requires at least SDL 1.2.0. Note that if you didnt install SDL from source, you will also have to install the SDL-devel package.
2. Download the Aleph One/SDL source tarball, or get the source via CVS.
3. Under Unix, install Aleph One as follows:
$ ./configure
$ make
[become root]
# make install
Under BeOS, do this instead:
$ make -f Makefile.BeOS install
This will compile the source and create a directory AlephOne in your home directory that contains the AlephOne application and some data files.
2. Installing the data files
To play Aleph One, you will also need Marathon scenario (graphics, sound and map) data files. For your convenience, Ive created archives containing the data files from the now freely available Marathon (M1A1), Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity scenarios, converted to the formats needed by the SDL version of Aleph One.
- Unix: Either download and install at least one of the AlephOne-M1A1, AlephOne-Marathon2 or AlephOne-Infinity RPM packages, or download one of the AlephOne-M1A1-1.0.tar.gz, AlephOne-Marathon2-1.0.tar.gz or AlephOne-Infinity-1.0.tar.gz tarballs and unexpand it to /usr/local/share/AlephOne/.
- BeOS: Download one of the AlephOne-M1A1-1.0.tar.gz, AlephOne-Marathon2-1.0.tar.gz or AlephOne-Infinity-1.0.tar.gz tarballs and unexpand it to the same directory as the AlephOne application.
The packages contain the files Images, Map, Map.resources, Music, Shapes, Sounds, some scripts, and the respective instruction manual in PDF format (from the original Mac version).
Playing Aleph One
First, be sure to read the README file that comes with Aleph One/SDL.
- Unix: If you have installed the Marathon, Marathon 2, or Marathon Infinity scenario, type
$ alephone-m1a1
for M1A1, or
$ alephone-marathon2
for Marathon 2, or
$ alephone-infinity
for Marathon Infinity, to start the game. If you dont have hardware-accelerated OpenGL, you will get better performance by specifying the -g option. If this causes corrupted graphics (red screen), you should also specify the -m option.
BeOS: Double-click the AlephOne application.
Enhancements:
- This version is based on a new upstream release with improved Internet gaming, Lua scripting support, and lots of bugfixes.