The Castle (version 1.0.0)

1. Overview

"The Castle" is a first-person shooter style game in a dark fantasy setting. Your main weapon is a sword, so the fight is mostly short-range. 3 main levels included, packed with creatures, items and sounds.

Also a couple of bonus levels are available, for fun and to show off some engine features. In particular, there's the classic DOOM E1M1 level — I know you always wanted to have a sword and a bow in DOOM :) Enjoy !

Requirements to run: At least 512 MB RAM is recommended. Fast and stable OpenGL is also needed (read: good graphic card with up-to-date drivers). The game was tested with various graphic cards and OpenGL implementations: NVidia, Radeon with closed drivers from ATI and open-source ones, Mesa OpenGL also works (although pure software Mesa will usually be too slow).

History and plans: This game is a little old now, and it doesn't really use the capabilities of latest Castle Game Engine versions. This game was initially developed for PascalGameDevelopment competition. It was at the beginning of 2006, at a time when our engine didn't even have a version number yet :) A new game, that actually uses the current capabilities of our engine (we developed a lot of new features since 2006...), is planned.

2. Download

Download "The Castle", version 1.0.0:

Linux (32 bit)

Linux (64 bit, x86_64)

Windows (32 bit, works on 64-bit too)

Mac OS X (32 bit)

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If you like this software, please consider donating.

See news for the list of changes since last release.

This is free software, so if you're interested you're also welcome to download game sources.

2.1. Installing

• Linux, FreeBSD:

  To hear game sounds you should first install OpenAL and vorbisfile library. If installing the older OpenAL Sample Implementation from Loki be sure to install also libvorbis-dev package (i.e. with developers symlinks) too (otherwise SI reports that vorbis extension is present, but will fail to use it). This problem is not present with newer OpenAL-Soft, as it doesn't have vorbis extension and we will use our own handling then. If you don't want to hear sounds, you don't have to install OpenAL.

  Installing actual game: extract the downloaded archive anywhere. Run the game by running the binary, like ./castle.

  If you don't want to always run the binary from the game's directory, you can also extract the game (or make a symlink to extracted dir) to $HOME/.castle.data/, or /usr/local/share/castle/, or /usr/share/castle/. You can then move or symlink the binary castle to any place you like (e.g. $HOME/bin or /usr/local/bin).

• Mac OS X:

  The game requires X11 server, libpng and (if you want to hear sound) OpenAL with vorbisfile. See Mac OS X dependencies for simple instructions how to get them.

  Installing actual game: extract the downloaded archive anywhere. Run the game by running the binary, like ./castle. You can also install / symlink in special directories, see above Linux notes.

• Windows:

  OpenAL and vorbis libraries are already included in the archive. So you don't have to install OpenAL yourself.

  Installing actual game: extract the downloaded archive anywhere. Run the game by running castle.exe.

  Note that from the game you will be able to choose various audio devices (see menu Sound options). I advice to check both devices. Under Windows Generic Software device often sounds better than the default one. On the other hand, as far as I know, only Generic Hardware can produce sound better than stereo, if you have more than 2 speakers.

2.2. Uninstalling

Just delete the directory where you unpacked the game. You may also want to delete configuration file:

3. Movies

4. Freshmeat entry

Here's a link to "The Castle" entry on freshmeat. You can use this e.g. to subscribe to new releases, so that you will be automatically notified about new releases of "The Castle".