Crimson Fields is a tactical war game in the tradition of Battle Isle.

The outcome of the war lies in your hands. You decide which units are
sent to the front lines, and when to unleash the reserves. Your mission
objectives range from defending strategically vital locations to simply
destroying all enemy forces in the area. Protect supply convoys or raid
enemy facilities to uncover technological secrets or fill your storage
bays so you can repair damaged units or build new ones in your own
factories. Lead your troops to victory!

Tools are available to create custom maps and campaigns. You can also play
the original Battle Isle maps if you have a copy of the game.

You can pit yourself against another human player either in hot-seat mode
in front of the same machine or via e-mail, or against the computer.

Crimson Fields is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public
License (GPL). It has been developed and tested on Intel architecture
with Linux, but it shouldn't be too hard to make it compile and run on
other operating systems as well. So far it has been reported to work with
Linux, various flavours of BSD, Sun Solaris, MacOS X, BeOS, and MS Windows.

For installation instructions and system requirements see the INSTALL file.


The latest release can be found at:

http://crimson.seul.org


INTERNATIONALISATION

KNOWN PROBLEMS

The font distributed with Crimson Fields (Bitstream Vera) lacks a number
of glyphs which may be required for proper display of your language. If
some characters are not displayed (correctly) this is most probably the
cause. A temporary solution is to locally replace the Vera.ttf file with
a more complete TTF font file.

NEW TRANSLATIONS

Adding support for an additional language to Crimson Fields is a matter
of three separate, but similar steps:

* Translation of the in-game messages
  The best way to do this is to copy the file locale/en.tmpl (or a
  template of another language that you want to use as the base of your
  work; the english version is authoritative, though) to
  locale/<yourLocaleCode>.tmpl and then translate all messages contained
  in this file.
  The underscore is used to define the keyboard equivalents to buttons
  etc. This mechanism currently only works with standard 7-bit ASCII
  characters.
  When the translation is complete call
  tools/mklocale -l <yourTemplate> <locale>
  to transform the template into a language data file <locale> and copy
  this file to the Crimson Fields data directory as
  locale/<yourLocaleCode>.dat. Upon launching the game, your language
  should now be available. Having a translation for the in-game messages
  is prerequisite to the following steps.

* Translation of unit names
  This currently has to be done in the sources (tools/default_units.c).
  Copy one of the existing names sections at the end of the file and
  modify it. To check the results, run 'make' in the tools directory and
  then copy the file 'default.units' into the Crimson Fields data
  directory.

* Translations of missions
  Each mission (levels/*.src) contains one or more messages sections
  ("[messages(<localeCode>)]"). Copy one of these sections (again, english
  should be considered authoritative) and translate the messages.
  After that, run the file through cfed again (usually
  tools/cfed levels/<mission>.src --tiles tools/default.tiles \
                                  --units tools/default.units
  ) and copy the resulting file into the Crimson Fields maps directory.

All messages must be encoded in UTF-8 format! If translations for unit
names or a mission do not exist in the selected game language, the english
version will be used.


Feel free to send any kind of constructive (or encouraging) feedback.

Have fun!

  Jens Granseuer <jensgr@gmx.net>

