ALIEN ARENA

1. Introduction
2. System Requirements
3. Getting Started
* Installation
* Basic Commands
* Completing Levels
* Connecting to a server
4. The CodeRED ACE Bot
5. The Rewards System
6. How to uninstall
7. Credits
8. Copyright Information


1.	INTRODUCTION

ALIEN ARENA is a fast paced arena FPS game with multiple modes, mutators and level, wrapped in a macabre sci-fi theme that harkens back to the classic themes of the 1950's.

The game features 23 levels, which can be played competitively online against other players, or practice offline against the built in AI(bots).  

Alien Arena offers Capture The Flag, All Out Assault(players can climb into randomly spawned jetpacks to do battle), and Tactical(Alien Vs Human in a battle to destroy the other's base by planting bombs and other means).  Simply go into the multiplayer menu to start a server, change the game rules , and choose a map to play on.  You can also select from a large variety of different mutators(instagib, rocket arena, excessive, low grav, regen, vampire, etc) to further customize your game experience.

Alien Arena : Many are called, only one will reign supreme.

Eternal war ravaged the vastness of infinite space. For as far back into the ages as the memories of the galaxies oldest races could reach, it had been this way. Planet at war with planet, conflicts ending with a burned cinder orbiting a dead sun and countless billions sent screaming into oblivion. War, endless and eternal, embracing all the peoples of the cosmos. Scientific triumphs heralded the creation of ever more deadly weapons until the very fabric of the universe itself was threatened.

Then came the call.

Some said it was sent by an elder race, legendary beings of terrifying power who had existed since the birth of the stars and who now made their home beyond the fringes of known creation, others whispered fearfully and looked to the skies for the coming of their gods. Perhaps it didn't matter who had sent the call, for all the people of the stars could at least agree that the call was there.

The wars were to end - or they would be ended. In a demonstration of power whoever had sent the call snuffed out the homeworld of the XXXX, the greatest empire of all the stars, in a heartbeat. One moment it was there, the next it was dust carried on the solar winds. All races had no choice but to heed the call.

For most the call was a distant tug, a whispered warning that the wars were over, but for the greatest hero of each people it was more, it was a fire raging through their blood, a call to a new war, to the battle to end all battles. That fire burns in your blood, compelling you, the greatest warrior of your people, to fight in a distant and unknown arena, your honor and the future of your race at stake.

Across the stars you traveled in search of this arena where the mightiest of the mighty would do battle, where you would stand face to face with your enemies in a duel to the death. Strange new weapons awaited you, weapons which you would have to master if you were to survive and emerge victorious from the complex and deadly arenas in which you were summoned to fight.

The call to battle beats through your heart and soul like the drums of war. Will you be the one to rise through the ranks and conquer all others, the one who stands proud as the undefeated champion of the Alien Arena? 


2.	SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

2.8 GHz CPU
4 GiB RAM
1.2 GiB hard disk space
3D Accelerator with at least 512 MiB texture memory available

3.	GETTING STARTED

* INSTALLATION

(Windows)

Installation is very easy with the Alien Arena Installer. Download and run the setup.exe: https://www.alienarena.org/alienarenainstaller/setup.exe.
Windows Defender might block the installation, if that happens, then click on "More info" and then on "Run anyway" to continue the installation.
This click-once installer will automatically check for future updates to the installer. If the installer isn't opened automatically after installation, click the Alien Arena icon on the desktop to run the installer. Click the Install button to install Alien Arena. After installing, you can press Launch to play or click the Update button to install the latest updates.

(Linux)

This is depending on the Linux distribution. Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu already have it in the package repository. For other distributions, installing from Flathub is probably the easiest option: https://flathub.org/apps/org.alienarena.alienarena.
See also the README and INSTALL documentation files.

* BASIC COMMANDS

ALIEN ARENA works very much like Quake and Unreal Tournament, with a few notable exceptions.

The player will have the following weapons:

1.	Blaster (automatically equipped at spawn)
2.	Alien Disruptor
3.	Chaingun
4.	Flame Thrower
5.	Rocket Launcher
6.	Alien Smart Gun
7.	Disruptor
8.	Alien Vaporizer
9.	Violator (automatically equipped at spawn)
10.	Minderaser(replaces re-spawning weapon every 2 minutes)

Weapons also have alternate firing modes.  In you controls menu, select your secondary fire key and this will allow you to use these modes.  The default key for alternate fire is MOUSE2 (right click).

There are powerups such as double damage, alien force, haste and sproing.

Although the game automatically detects hardware capability on intial run, it would be advisable for you to change video settings for however you wish to view the game, and what gives you reasonable performance.  

ALIEN ARENA also allows for colored names just as Quake 3, using the ^ character followed by a number to set the color.

Movement is based on Quake 2 physics, allowing strafejumping, doublejumping, and other Quake type movements.  In Alien Arena, you can also dodge, similarly to Unreal Tournament, by pressing a strafe key, releasing it fully, and pressing it again.  Dodges can be linked together into sequences, similar to strafejumping, called strafedodging.  You can also lean around corners, and sneak silently.

* COMPLETING LEVELS

Your goal is to reach the fraglimit before your opponents, or by scoring the most frags before the time limit is up.

In CTF mode, you'll be on a team, and trying to capture the enemy's flag and return it to your own flag's location.  The team reaching the capture limit first, wins.

In Tactical, the goal is to destroy all of the components of the enemy base before they destroy yours.  As items are destroyed, defenses such as laser beams and deathrays gradually begin to malfuncion or weaken.  There are 3 classes on each team, each with different capabilities such as planting bombs, detonating them, or having a superweapon to protect the bomber/detonators.

* CONNECTING TO A SERVER

You can select "join server" from the "multiplayer" menu and select a server in the list.  Servers are listed in order of ping, with lowest ping at the top of the list.  

4.	THE CODERED ACE BOT

Bots are a built in feature of ALIEN ARENA.  Several bots are already configured for multiplayer games, and in Alien Arena, each level has a specific bot file for what bots are to be played in each level.

To add a bot, type "sv addbot name model/skin", and to remove a bot type "sv removebot name". You can also add bots in the menu, in the deathmatch/bots flags area.

In your Deathmatch options, you can configure other options such as chatting, node saving, and aiming.

These bots are fully configurable using the Botconfigurator program.  You can change their skill levels, accuracy, weapon favoring, awareness, and chat strings.

Skill level 0 bots are quite easy to beat.  Skill level 1 bots are a little tougher, and do more dodging and are more accurate.  Skill level 2 bots do more advanced dodging, rocket jumping, and are even more accurate.  Level 3 bots are extremely skilled, and will strafe, and strafe jump around the level.  They will also taunt you after killing you.  If in Alien Arena, you play the single player tournament against the bots, selecting "easy" will make all bots skill level 0.  Selecting "normal" will leave them at whatever level they are configured. Selecting "hard" will make them all move up 1 skill level.

5.	THE REWARDS SYSTEM

In Alien Arena, you are given points for getting kills (one point for kill), two points for special kills (midair kills, gib kills), and five extra points for killing sprees.  These points add up, and when these points reach the point threshold (set by the server), they can be used to purchase temporary powerups:  invisibility, haste, and sproing.  Invisibility makes you appear like glass, haste makes your jumps increase your speed dramatically (linking jumps together makes this difference even more drastic), and sproing greatly increases the player jump height.  These powerups last for 30 seconds.

6.	HOW TO UNINSTALL ALIEN ARENA

To uninstall Alien Arena on Windows, delete the folder where you installed Alien Arena from the Alien Arena Installer. To uninstall the Alien Arena Installer, go to Add/Remove programs and features and uninstall the Alien Arena Installer from there.
For Linux users, see the README documentation file. 

7.	CREDITS

There is a long list of credits - ALIEN ARENA is greatly indebted to the following for its creation and completion:

Design:  John Diamond, Max Eliaser, Jim Bower with input from the community at large.
Programming:  John Diamond, Max Eliaser, Jim Bower, Dave Stewart, Emmanuel Benoit, Charles Hudson, Lee Salzman, Victor Luchits, Shane Bayer, Jan Rafaj, Tony Jackson, Kyle Hunter, Andres Mejia, Raoul de Raadt
Models and skins:  John Diamond, Dennis Zedlach
Maps:  John Diamond, Charles Hudson
Textures and Artwork:  John Diamond, Phillip K, Dennis Zedlach, Adam Saizlai, Yves Allaire
Sounds:  John Diamond, Sound Rangers, Jon Ward, Jim Bower
Music:  Divinity, Paul Joyce, Arteria Games, Whitelipper, and SoundRangers

Linux Port: Shane Bayer, John Diamond, Jim Bower
FreeBSD port: "Ale"
Gentoo portage: Paul Bredbury
Debian packaging: Andres Mejia, Raoul de Raadt
Public Relations / promotion:  Victor Balke, Raoul de Raadt
Web server, game server and IRC server hosting: Alexis Grigoriou

There are other major contributions from the gaming community, including MrG, Jay Dolan, Psychospaz, Barnes, Jalisko, Heffo, Chayfo, Dukey, Jitspoe, Knightmare, Barens, MH, and Carbon14.  Without this wonderful group of people, and the release of their accomplishments, many features would not have been possible.  A special thanks for Lee Salzman for creating the new model format(IQM) and his assistance in getting it working for us.  A very special thanks goes out to the community members who contributed to the crosshair and hud contest. A full list of those contributors can be found in the in-game credit list.

IRC: irc.alienarena.org:6697 or irc.alienarena.org:6667, channel #alienarena
Discord: https://discord.gg/Rd5fwBg
Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#alienarena:matrix.org

8.	COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

ALIEN ARENA and it's original content are a copyright of COR Entertainment, LLC.  

The source code of Alien Arena is Free Software. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Source code is located at https://svn.icculus.org/alienarena and https://github.com/alienarena/alienarena.

The included TrueType fonts (FreeSans and FreeMono) are from the GNU FreeFont package (http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/); they are free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html).

Permission is granted to freely distribute (without restriction) the game data in this installation(models, maps, textures, sound, etc) as a whole, and with the intention of being used with Alien Arena. However, it is not permissible to distribute, sell, or use for profit individual portions or items of the game data without express consent from COR Entertainment.

'rcon' and 'svstat' ruby scripts are Copyright (C) 2009 Tony Jackson and Licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License

The Debian packaging is (C) 2009, Andres Mejia <mcitadel@gmail.com> and is licensed under the GPL, see `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL'.

ALIEN ARENA may be included in free compilation CD's and similar packages without consent, provided it adheres to the above restrictions.

Contact:  jar-el@alienarena.org

Privacy Policy: http://icculus.org/alienarena/rpa/privacy2.html



