xBaK

Introduction

xBaK is a fan-made remake of the classic Sierra computer RPG "Betrayal at Krondor" running on linux. xBaK is licensed under the GPL version 3. See LICENSE for more information.

Requirements

Required tools and software (minimum version is listed):

• SDL-2.0.x
• SDL_mixer-2.6.x

SDL_mixer must be built with Timidity++ support. SDL_mixer also requires a GUS compatible set of sound patches. You can download those from the SDL_mixer website and unpack them in your current working directory. At present that is the only place xBaK will look for them.

Building

Required tools and software for building xBaK:

• CMake
• C++ compiler tool chain
• development versions of the required SDL libraries

To build on linux change to the directory where the xBaK sources are extracted. Next run "cmake ." and, if no errors are reported, continu to run "make". There is no need to run "make install" yet. The resulting executables can be found in the "./src" subdirectory.

Building xBaK on other platforms may be possible but not actively supported.

Running

To play the game simply start the xbak executable. Please keep in mind that this is still a work in progress. Many features are either buggy or not implemented at all.

Notes for running the xBaK game:

• Original data files xBaK requires the following files, containing resource data:

  • krondor.cfg
  • krondor.rmf
  • krondor.001
  • frp.sx
  • startup.gam

  Note that the filenames are in lower case. You might need to rename them. These original data files must be stored in one of the following directories:

  • ./
  • /krondor/
  • ./krondor/
  • ../krondor/
  • /opt/krondor/
  • /bakcd/
  • ./bakcd/
  • ../bakcd/
  • /opt/bakcd/

• Other files
  On Linux/BSD/Unix platforms xbak will create its own directory structure for user specific data on startup. The directory structure is as follows:

  • user data:
    ~/.xbak
  • screenshots:
    ~/.xbak/capture
  • saved games:
    ~/.xbak/games

  On other platforms the current directory is used for everything, except the original Betrayal at Krondor data files mentioned above.

• Grabbing keyboard and mouse
  Initially the keyboard and mouse are not grabbed. Grabbing the input can be toggled by pressing the F12 key. Or, if the input is not grabbed, move the mouse inside the xBaK application window and press the left or right mouse button to grab the input. When the input is grabbed, pressing the middle mouse button will release the grab on input.

• Screenshots
  Screenshots can be made using the F11 key. The screenshots will be saved in the dedicated screenshot directory mentioned earlier. The images are stored in BMP format. The filenames have the following form: xbak_.bmp, with ranging from 001 to 999. Pre-existing screenshot files will be overwritten.

Besides the xBaK game engine several other executables are available. Most of those are just utilities that are only helpful for developing xBaK. The only other application that can be useful for end users is convertresource. With convertresource one can extract the data files from, and recombine them into the resource archive. It is also possible to extract the individual bitmap images from the .BMX data files.