Sphere v1.0
Chad Austin
2003.01.22



Sphere is a 2D RPG creation system designed to facilitate creation of games
in the style of Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star.



System Requirements:
- Pentium 200
- 64 MB of RAM
- Video card with 2MB VRAM
- Sound card for audio
- Windows 95, 98, NT4, 2000, or later
- DirectX 3 for fullscreen video drivers
- OpenGL-accelerated video card for hardware acceleration (sphere_gl)


Features:
- unlimited map layers
- parallax and automatic layer scrolling
- flexible video driver subsystem
- supports any screen resolution
- 32-bit color and 256 levels of translucency
- 8-directional movement
- animated and reflective tiles
- plays Ogg Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, MOD, S3M, XM, IT, and uncompressed WAV
- graphical editing environment
- keyboard, mouse, and joystick support



Included video drivers:
- standard32.dll     - 32-bit color (default)
- standard16.dll     - 16-bit color (about twice as fast as standard32)
- standard8.dll      - 8-bit color (about four times as fast as standard32, but
                       ugly as all get out)
- greyscale.dll      - 8-bit greyscale (as fast as standard8, but completely in
                       greyscale)
- interpolate32.dll  - same as standard32, but resolution is doubled for some
                       smoothing effects
- interpolate16.dll  - same as standard16, but resolution is doubled for some
                       smoothing effects (including 2xSaI!  Check it out!)
- sphere_gl.dll      - hardware acceleration using OpenGL



Known Issues
- See the project page on SourceForge for bug reports and feature
  requests.  http://sourceforge.net/projects/sphere
- The editor may randomly crash after using it for an extended amount
  of time.  Save your work often.



Executable listing:
- engine.exe    - Sphere engine
- editor.exe    - Sphere editor
- config.exe    - Sphere configuration utility



Credits
=======

Code -
  Chad Austin (AegisKnight)
  Theo Reed (rizen)
  Brandon Mechtley (malis)
  Jacky Chong (Darklich)
  Brian Robb (Flik)

Startup Game -
  SDHawk



Please send all suggestions and bug reports to aegis@aegisknight.org.
