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Presentation

War is declared!

Have the mascots of your favorite free software programs battle in the WarMUX arena. Using dynamite, grenades, baseball bats and other bazookas,... exterminate your opponent in a funny 2D cartoon style environment.

Each player (2 minimum on the same PC or network game with 0.8 version) controls the team of his choice (penguin, gnu, firefox, wilber,...) and must destroy his adversary using exotic weapons.

Although some strategy is required to win, WarMUX is pre-eminently a "convivial mass murder" game where, turn by turn, each member of each team attempts to inflict the most damage to his opponents.

At the beginning of the game each player has a team made up of characters (default is 6) which look like a Free Software mascot. (For instance: 6 Tux and 6 Nupik in a 2 players game). Characters are scattered randomly on a 2 dimensional map much like a platform game such as in the old (but good ;-) Mario or Sonic.

Each turn you play, your goal is to damage the opposing team(s), using the weapon of your choice and the ground cleverly (falling hurts, characters do not know how to swim, going out of the map kills, ...). A turn is made up of one player getting to control a character from his team for a limited amount of time (default is 60 seconds). Each character can move and use one weapon per turn. After a turn ends, the next player gets to take a turn, and so on.

You win the game when your team is the only one with at least one character alive.

Start a game

Main Menu :

Click on "Play" to access the game menu:

WarMUX is a multi-player game, so there must be 2, 3, or 4 players on the same computer. You can set how many players will play by increasing or decreasing the number of teams (Using right/left click or the mouse wheel).

Each player controls a team which aims to destroy opposing teams. Each team is composed of 2 to 10 characters (default is 6). It's not mandatory to have same number of characters on each team. You can change the number of characters each team has in order to balance stronger and weaker players. You can also choose the mascot which you are going to play by right or left click on the pictures of the mascot, as well as enter your nickname for the team in the box labeled "Head Commander". If you want to play against the computer, there's an artificial intelligence that is still under development, and from which you can not therefore expect much : to play against it, you just have to name the opposite Head Commander "AI-stupid". [more informations]

The battle area is a Map. There are lots of maps with many styles, choose the one you prefer! Some maps contain water on the bottom that characters can fall into (and die), while others contain a roof which blocks certain weapons such as the Air Strike.

Click on the "Game" tab to access the game option menu:	WarMUX is played turn by turn, and all players use the same keyboard and mouse on their turn. By default, a turn is 60 seconds, you can change this value by right/left clicking on the number or with the mouse-wheel.
	In the same way, you can change the duration of the game before the death mode begins. When the death mode is activated, every character get damaged (you can choose how much with the "Damage per turn during death mode" option), and the level of the water grows every turn. By default, the death mode begins after 10 minutes and every character looses 5 hit points per turn.

In the same page, you can also choose the initial amount of energy of each character as well as the maximum amount they can get with the bonus boxes (respectively 100 and 200 by default), the moment the players can switch their active characters (always, before action or never), and the intensity of the gravity. But since the WarMUX devs are very friendly, they have also created some "Game modes", which include predefined settings that allow you to vary the pleasures easily. The Classic mode is good if you want to play a long and strategic game. The unlimited is practical if you want to play a short game and try all the weapons, and the blitz, if you want to improve your reflex!

When you have chosen your configuration, press enter or click on the green V to start the game!

Play!

When the game begins a character is selected at random and marked with a jumping arrow on top of it. This is the active character. The player whose team this character is on must now control it in order to damage the opposing team(s). You can move the character with the right and left arrows keys, jump to fly over obstacles (Enter, BackSpace or B). By doing this you can move closer to a far away enemy, protect yourself by moving your character out of harm's way, and just generally move around. If you wish you were controlling a different character on your team, you can select another pressing Tab or simply clicking on the one you want. But following the option you have chosen, you can do this always, only before you have made your first move this turn, or simply never.

To choose your weapon, right click and select a weapon from the menu. Moving where you want is sometimes difficult because of the ground, you can try the grapple, the jetpack, the parachute, the teleportation device, or the low gravity machine to move further.

Moving is not enough to destroy your enemy, you must choose weapon to fight. There are numerous weapons which are all different in terms of usability, range, damage power. Most weapons are shot by pressing the Space key. The longer you hold the Space key, the faster and farther they fly. Other weapons are shot by left clicking on the place where you wish to hit. Some weapons need to to be aimed at the enemy by the up and down arrows keys. You can slow down how fast the character aims while pressing up / down by holding Shift as you aim. Weapons such as the grenade have a settable fuse which lets you choose how long (in seconds) it takes for them to explode after you fire them. This can be changed by pressing the number keys 1 to 5 or with the mouse-wheel.

Camera

Sometimes the camera doesn't show the area of the map you wish to look at, you can control where it shows with the following keys:

• To center the camera on the active character, press C.
• To manually move the camera, move the mouse cursor while pressing down Ctrl or the mouse middle / mouse-wheel button.
• To manually move the camera if the option "Scroll on border" is turned on, simply move your mouse cursor near edge of the screen in the direction you want the camera to go.
  

Additional info

• Documentation article: How to play online.
• Computer players and Artificial Intelligence : this is a beta feature targeted for 0.9 (which is still far away), and therefore DONT expect much from it. Simply enter AI-stupid as the name of a player
• It is unlikely bugs, strange behaviours or stupid actions will get fixed until WarMUX project gets serious on this, so bug reports related to Artificial Intelligence will probably be obsolete by the time they are looked at.
  

Useful keys