     LaserQuake Public Beta 1 (30/3/97 Easter Day!!:) )
     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
     By Phish Inc productions (twoflower@geocities.com)
     ==================================================

Readme by Henry Cooke
---------------------

Introduction
------------
LaserQuake is a TC of all those real world lasertag games where you leg it
around shooting people with your lasergun. We (me, Matt, and all the
playtesting posse) are LaserQuest junkies, and we've been wanting to do a TC
since DooM. However, every game has had a complete pants engine until Quake,
so we haven't been able to get it done till now. Cheers, Id!

How to play
-----------
For the moment, there is no single player game as such (it can be played
by a single player, more about that later). Both the server and the client
need a copy of the game. For the client, it's simple. Connect to the server
(wooohoo!)- everything is set by the server. For the server, start a new
multiplayer game as normal. Once in, you should be prompted for the game
options- these can be set in the console or in the game. Descriptions of all
the options are as follows:

Deathtime: the amount of time a player spends 'dead' (not shooting) in secs.

Game mode: Solo, team, Predator, Vampire and Alien. Solo or team are fairly
obvious- clients will be prompted for which team they want to be on when they
connect, bots are assigned to teams randomly. Predator doesn't work yet :)
what it will be is a game where each player has a set number of lives, when
they use 'em all up, they're dead. A vampire game is where one player is the
vampire, they have 20 lives, and all the other players have 10. Alien mode is
where one player is the alien, who has a rapidfire weapon and a *lot* of
resistance to shots.

Do you want bots?: pretty obvious. (thanks to WolfG!)

How many bots do you want?: another obvious one.
 
Everything is menu driven and hopefully easy to use. There are options I
haven't detailed here, but you should be able to work 'em out.

We have included a beta level (fairly sparse and not lighted) called 'lq1' and there
is also a MAP included in the laserqke\maps directory that needs compling (my HD is 
too full for a swapfile big enough to compile it, Matt couldn't be arsed). We recommend
playing on DM6, possibly the best deathmatch level in Quake, and the best suited to LQ.


Changes to the statusbar
------------------------
The number on the left, which was armour, is now a count of the number of
times you've hit someone. Health is now a clock, either the amount of time
left in the game (not quite working yet) or the amount of time left till
you come back to life. Ammo is now the amount of times you've been hit.
Your score is the amount of times you've been hit taken away from the amount
of times you've hit someone

Game Controls
--------------
In Console:-
     startgame = start the game
     return = Return to airlock
     scorecard1 = shows 1st set of scores
     scorecard2 = shows 2nd set of scores
     scorecard3 = shows 3rd set of scores
     showkills = shows who you killed
     showhits = shows who hit you
     showteam = shows whos on your team
     togglerapid = turn on rapid fire
     selectweapon = change between rapid fire and normal fire modes
     select = chose to be vampire/alien if there isn't one
Key:-
     / = startgame
     \ = selectweapon
     enter = return

Insult system
-------------
The keys 0-9 are insult keys- press 'em to shout abuse at the other players.
At the moment they're just random wavs scraped from all over Matt's HD, we'll
do some proper ones (with '18' rated options..heh heh heh) as soon as we
can record samples of us shouting our heads off.

Kinda sorta dodgy single player mode
------------------------------------
Load your IPX drivers (if you don't have anything plugged into any com ports, 
don't bother), and make a new multiplayer game (IPX if you loaded your 
drivers, direct connect if you have empty com ports) Set all the game options 
and have about 8 bots. It will probably be pretty hard, but if you really must
play singly, this is the only was it can be done at the moment.

Known Bugs & unfinished stuff
-----------------------------
Predator mode doesn't work properly
The background music system is unfinished
The clock doesn't work properly
The credit/help screens are unfinished
The animation on human players is screwed
*Please report any stuff we haven't listed here!!*

Le fini
-------
This is a *beta*. Don't expect a perfect, finished, bugfree game. There is
probably a shedload of stuff we haven't noticed or done wrong, and that's
the whole point we're realeasing this- widespread testing.

Cheers for taking the time to read this,

Henry Cooke & presumably Matt Gravestock (he's busy deathmatching at the
moment :) )

P.S Lindsay is single, female and straight. She wanted me to mention that.

I'm off to play some deathmatch!
