battalion on Windows

(c) 1995-1998 Andrew Johnson

monsters, explosions, and senseless destruction.
You've seen the movies, you know what to do.

or

a sophisticated simulation of an elevationally
challenged reptile and his ongoing problems with authority

Version 1.5 - January 1998.

This is the first major update to battalion since September 1996 when the Macintosh version was released.

legal stuff

battalion is Copyright (c) 1994-1998 by Andrew Johnson - All Rights Reserved

battalion is provided free of charge. There is no registration fee.

Permission to copy and distribute battalion in its entirety, for non- commercial purposes, is hereby granted without fee provided this copyright notice appears in all copies.

If you redistribute battalion then the ENTIRE contents of this distribution must be distributed.

Note that distributing battalion in with any product is considered to be a 'commercial purpose.'

This software may be modified for your own purposes, but modified versions may not be distributed without prior consent of the author.

This software is provided 'as-is' without any express or implied warrenty. In no event shall the author be held liable for any damages arising from the use or misuse of this software.

Should you want to do something with this software that is prohibited by the above copyright, please contact the author (email please) as he is very likely willing to sell out for the almighty dollar.

a bit of history

battalion was originally writen in GL(r) on a Silicon Graphics Indy workstation. The game was first publically shown at the EVE-4 event at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a CAVE(tm) based virtual reality game. The desktop version won 'best Indy game' in the 3rd Indizone Contest, and a slightly modified version of the game shipped with all Silicon Graphics Indy and Indigo2 workstations. I then converted battalion to OpenGL(r) and ported it to other flavours of UNIX (SunOS, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, AIX) and Power Macintosh. These versions are available from the battalion home page at the link given below. battalion then won the Creator Games contest in 1997 from Silicon Graphics, becoming part of the Hot Mix 17 CDROM which is currently shipping with all Silicon Graphics workstation.

battalion is now available for Windows 95/NT. I have tried to add a reasonable 'Windows-like' shell around the game but it is still an X-based program at heart.

Since battalion is written in OpenGL, I would like to thank Alan Garny for his nice Borland C++ Builder OpenGL widget which made it pretty easy to get this program going under Windows. I am currently using the older pre-registration version of the widget. At some point I will upgrade to the current version.

This program also contains a small bit of code modified from Silicon Graphics' tk library.

see the help screens

The original help files for battalion were created in Showcase(r) which unfortunately only runs on Silicon Graphics workstations, so I have converted those pages to GIF files which are viewable from these pages.

The Help screens

expected performance

I have only tried this out on Windows 95 on an IBM Thinkpad 560X where it runs decently in a small window.

things that need work

As this is first official release for Windows I'm sure there will be a few things that still need tweaking. Here is my list so far:

Several things have been fixed since the previous betas:

battalion links

The main resource for information on the game, FAQ list, and the latest downloadable versions is the battalion Home Page

Andy Johnson's Home Page


SGIs OpenGL Home Page
Alan Garny's page
Borland's C++ Builder

3rd Indizone Contest Home Page
Hot Mix

how to reach the author

ajohnson@uic.edu
http://www.evl.uic.edu/aej

Andrew Johnson
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (M.C 154)
University of Illinois at Chicago
851 South Morgan St. Room 1120 SEO
Chicago, IL 60607