0. Contents of This Document
----------------------------

    1. Introduction to Crystal Space V0.14
    2. Disclaimer
    3. Current Status
    4. Using Crystal Space For Your Project
    5. Reporting Bugs
    6. Where To Get Crystal Space...
    7. Mailing Lists
    8. The Texture Archive
    9. Other Documents
    10. The Author and Some History



1. Introduction to Crystal Space (V0.14)
----------------------------------------

Crystal Space is a 6DOF 3D engine (like Quake) with static colored lighting
(not like Quake) and many other features.  See 'docs/engine.txt' for a
complete list of features and some explanation about the algorithms that are
used.

Crystal Space is still very much in development.  It has now become a real
Internet Project! Everyone who feels inclined can contribute to the source.
There are several things that still need to be done.  See the 'docs/todo.html'
file for more information about what is missing and a list of current known
bugs.

Crystal Space is free and should remain free.  Crystal Space falls under the
GNU copyleft license for libraries.  To see what this means read the COPYING
file that should be included with this archive.  In short it means that you
are allowed to use Crystal Space in your products.  You are even allowed to
sell your product using Crystal Space provided Crystal Space itself remains
free.

Please read the 'docs/faq.html' file if you have a question.  If you don't
find the answer there you can always E-Mail me (address below in this readme).
[NOTE: faq.html is extremely out of date.]


2. Disclaimer
-------------

[LAWYER MODE ON]

DISCLAIMER!  I'm not responsible in any way for any damage this program may
incur on you, your family or your computer.  I think nothing harmful will
happen but if it does, the author (Jorrit Tyberghein) is not responsible!

[LAWYER MODE OFF]


3. Current Status
-----------------

Important Note! Crystal Space is still in beta.  This means that there are
many known and unknown bugs and that things in general may not work as
expected (or may not work at all).  The known bugs are in docs/todo.html; I'm
currently still busy making the list of unknown bugs :-)

However Crystal Space starts to become useful.  There are actually already a
few projects starting to use CS.

Crystal Space is also not fully optimized yet.  Performance is adequate
provided you have a Pentium but things could certainly be better.

We also have a very active developers team working to make it as useable as
possible.  We are are getting there :-)


4. Using Crystal Space For Your Project
---------------------------------------

What if you want to use Crystal Space in your project? Well this is possible.
The best approach at this point in time is to become a member of the
developers mailing list (more about this later) and listen how everything
develops.  If you're really serious about things you can even join discussions
and develop stuff.  I will gladly add contributed code to Crystal Space
(provided I can use the stuff, I will not add code to format disks as I think
that this is a little off topic :-)

Note that you also need to agree to the LGPL (read the COPYING file for more
details) but I don't think that this is a real problem.

I'm always interested in hearing what other people are doing with Crystal
Space.  Even if it is only for small private projects I'd like to hear about
it (just out of curiosity).


5. Reporting Bugs
-----------------

If you find a bug in Crystal Space and it is not in docs/todo.html you should
send a bug report to the Crystal Space mailing list at: crystal@lists.linux.it
Try to give as much information as possible:

    - The computer/OS (Windows, DOS, OS/2, Unix, Linux, ...)
    - Type of processor (Pentium, SPARC, 680x0, ...)
    - The display type (8-bit, 16-bit, 640x480, ...)
    - The exact output of Crystal Space
    - How to reproduce the crash (if it is reproducable).
    - A fix for the bug :-)


6. Where To Get Crystal Space...
--------------------------------

The Crystal Space home page.  This page contains the latest development and
official releases of Crystal Space.  Here is a small note about the difference
between the official and the development (beta) releases: both the official
and development versions are actually beta.  The difference is that the
official release should be more stable and will be easier to get working as
all documentation and makefiles are up-to-date.  The development release will
probably have more features but it may not work very well on your particular
system, it may not work at all, or you might not be able to compile it.  But
the development release may also work very well.  You never know.  My page
also contains some documents, some links, a few screenshots and levels for
Crystal Space.  Here is the URL:

  http://crystal.linuxgames.com/

If you want to keep in touch with the latest development of CS you can try to
access the CVS server.  Have a look at the above page to see how this works.


7. Mailing Lists
----------------

There are currently two mailing lists for Crystal Space.  The first one is
just a list of E-mails that I maintain.  Everyone who is just interested in
hearing from me whenever there is a new version of Crystal Space can be put on
this list.  Just send a mail with something like 'subscribe new version' to me
(Jorrit.Tyberghein@uz.kuleuven.ac.be) and I will put your E-mail address in
this list.  On the Crystal Space home page there is also a little form that
can be used to subscribe (BUT DON'T FORGET TO FILL IN YOUR E-MAIL THERE!!!)
Note that if you make a mistake in your E-mail I will not be able to contact
you.  So be very careful when you type that E-mail of yours :-)

For more general and in-depth discussion of Crystal Space and related projects
(I mean games and such using Crystal Space) there is a real mailing list:
crystal@lists.linux.it.  To subscribe on this list send a mail to
crystal-request@lists.linux.it containing as subject: 'subscribe your@email'
(replace your@email with your email :-)  Messages should be sent to
crystal@lists.linux.it.  To unsubscribe send a mail to
crystal-request@lists.linux.it (NOT to crystal@lists.linux.it) with as
subject: 'unsubscrube your@email'.


8. The Texture Archive
----------------------

The textures from Crystal Space have now been split of into a seperate project
at http://server.empathy.com/crystal (the Crystal Space Texture Archive).


9. Other Documents
------------------

docs/INSTALL contains instructions for compiling and running Crystal Space.
It also contains information about some of the most useful commandline
options.

docs/COPYING contains the conditions by which you can use the Crystal Space
engine in your own products.  These conditions are from LGPL.

docs/dir.txt contains a list and description of the directory structure of
Crystal Space.  It also explains what all documents are for.

docs/authors.html contains a list of all people who contributed in some way to
the Crystal Space project.  Many thanks to them all.

The 'docs' directory contains a lot of useful documents about Crystal Space.


10. The Author and Some History
-------------------------------

My name is Jorrit Tyberghein.  I was born on 17-Oct-69 and I have a lovely
wife and a lovely daughter (she was born 1-Jan-98 :-)

I can be reached at: Jorrit.Tyberghein@uz.kuleuven.ac.be
My home page is: http://crystal.linuxgames.com/

I created this project by accident.  I was always fascinated by games like
Doom, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D and later Quake and I wondered how one would write
such a game.  My first effort was a Doom like engine.  It had some nice
features (like static lighting with shadows and sectors above other sectors)
but it was VERY SLOW!!! I abandoned the project (it became a bit clumsy) and
forgot about 3D for a short while.  But the urge was still there.  Every now
and then I would think about 3D engines.  But I wasn't thinking about Doom
anymore.  I wanted something more.  After months of thinking I still wasn't
planning to start writing code.  But then I read an article about portals.  I
wasn't sure what they were but from the little explanation in that article
things started to become clear.  Portals were the perfect way for me to write
a 3D engine quickly.  It was a very easy technique with which I could achieve
real 6DOF 3D!! At that point the knowledge I gathered during the past few
months had to get out of my head.  In a bit more than one month I wrote the
first version of Crystal Space (during my free time).  At that point I had a
portal engine with 6DOF, colored static lighting with shadows, primitive
scripting, mipmapping and moving objects.  Since time became a precious
resource I decided to release Crystal Space to the general public and I put an
announcement in comp.graphics.algorithms.  And this was the start of the
Crystal Space project.

I must say that I didn't expect the kind of response that I got (I received
mails from hundreds of people and all were very positive).  Many thanks to all
of you.
