                                                                  2000-07-08

    STune - The Battle for Aratis
    Version 0.82


For news and bugs, please read HISTORY.TXT.


 The story:

A war broke out in the universe. The Macrosap Empire has left his solar system
"Pessimi OSi" to conquer the solar system "Boni OSi". Relentlessly the Empire
is stealing the Sap of Life of the planets Aratis, Acoris, Amigis, Applis and
Lunis. But the ones who control the Sap are controlling the whole universe!
To stop the Macrosap Empire, rebellions on the planet came together to beat
the Empire out of their solar system.
Now, the people of Aratis have chosen you to be the leader of the rebellion
of Aratis, the steppen planet. It's up to YOU to save the people of Aratis!
You have to harvest the Sap and to fight against the evil Empire at the same
time... are you hard enough for this challenge?


 Deja vus:

Some of you might now have some "deja vus" after having read the story.
But I can ensure you that we have not borrowed it...
...well, perhaps we were "inspired" by some other things after all.
We have started in spring 1998 when Matthias suggested to program an Atari
game together. Matthias is a great fan of realtime strategy games like Dune 2.
And because we didn't know of an existing and good realtime strategy game for
our Atari, we have decided to write a Dune 2 clone.
So we started coding and now, we have released this preview: The game is not
yet finished, you can only play partially, the computer opponent is not yet
very clever, the grafics don't lool very professional (Spion is working on much
better grafics!)... but I think you can get a good impression how it will feel
& look like one day and how a modern game uses the GEM graphical user
interface.


 Needed hardware:

Be happy: You only need a Atari TOS compatible computer (that includes the
clones like the Milan, Hades...) with at least 1 MB RAM to run STune! You know,
STune is completely designed to run under GEM. The disadvantage of this feature
is the lower speed, so that you should have at least a computer with a CPU
clocked with 16MHz. Having FAST-RAM is also an advantage because STune often
accesses the RAM.
The actual demo version runs best in 16 or 256 colors because corresponding
images to these color depths are included in this distribution.
But by adapting the grafics, STune is able to run in all color depth up to 256
colors! High and true color modes are now also supported, the 256 color images
are then converted to 16 or 24 (but this may take a while at the beginning).
To hear the included sound samples, you need a Falcon compatible Sound-XBIOS.
If you have not an Atari Falcon, you may use Thothys program X-SOUND
(http://www.crosswinds.net/~thothy/atari/xsound.html - but it doesn't yet works
stable on normal STs) to hear the sounds.


 Some words about the usage:

STune should be easy to control due to the GEM interface (at least when we
have fully include the English language support in the program...).
You can select a unit or a building by clicking with the left mouse button on
it. Clicking on a free place will make a unit to go there. When you also hold
down the SHIFT key, the unit will patrol between two points. Clicking on a
enemy unit or building will make your combat unit to attack this as soon as
possible. To deselect a selected unit/building, just move your mouse pointer
over a free place and click on the right mouse button. If you have selected a
building and you press the right mouse button over the right building, a popup
appears where you can choose a new building (when the selected building was a
"Bauanlage") or a new unit (when the selected building was a "Fabrik" or a
"Kaserne"). Watch the information window to see when the production has
finished (KLF stands for small factory, GRF is the big factory, KAS are the
barracks and BAU is the building construction).
To repair or sell a building, select the menu entries "Repair building"" or
"Sell building", move youre mouse over the building (the mouse pointer should
change its form) on press the left button. Press right to leave the repairing
or selling mode.
Note that you will first to have a "Radar" and enough energie stations to get
a map in the information window. But you can move the red rectangle anyway.
There are also some keybord shortcuts. Look at the menu to learn some (e.g.
^Q means pressing CNTRL + Q). But there are also some other shortcuts:
CTRL-W will cycle the windows and with "y" or "z" you can place a produced
building on the playing field.
You can also use the cursor keys to scroll the window.


 Network mode:

To play STune versus another human player, it is now possible to use a STiK
compatible IP-stack like STiK, STinG, GlueStik+MiNTNet, iFusion. You can play
over the internet or over a local area network (LAN, only STinG and GlueStik
at the moment).
You can send your opponent a message by typing 'm' during the game. The message
will be shown in the information window of the opponent.


 Credits:

 * Idea, story, code:         Charon (mega_metty@gmx.de)
 * Code, graphical interface: Thothy (thothy@atari-computer.de)
 * Grafix:                    Spion of Escape (spion@atari.org)
 * The female voice:          Julia Ley
 * French translation:        Guillaume Deflache
 * Polish translation:        Rafal Kawecki
 * Swedish translation:       Fredrik Olsson
 * Czech translation:         Adam Pergler


 Thanks to:

 * Christian Jost:      For his tips about the artificial intelligence.
 * Alexander Kirchner:  For the IMG loader
 * Dan Ackerman:        For the high/true color convertion routine.
 * bITmASTER:           For the DSP MOD player
 * NoCrew:              For patching bITmASTER's player
 * Vassilis Papathanassiou: For his RSC-TRANSLATOR (a great help!)
 * Milhouse:            For the nice STune picture (at the top of the STune
                        homepage)
 * atari.org:           For the subdomain (stune.atari.org)
 * atari-computer.de:   For the webspace for the STune homepage
 * Stanislav Opichal:   For checking the charset of the czech textes.
 * All persons who send us criticism, praise and information about errors
   (I can't count anymore ;-) ... )


 Contact:

You can send your criticism, praise or error reports at any time via e-mail to
Thothy or Charon! Or use: stune@gmx.net !

The newest version of STune can be found in the internet:

  http://stune.atari.org

( or if this does not work, try:
  http://server4.fts.vs.bw.schule.de/thothy/stune/ )


May the sap to be with you!
