Translation(s): none


Introduction

LGeneral is a free software game engine and a turn-based strategy game in the tradition of Panzer General. It is possible to convert the original game data of Panzer General and to play the complete campaign. Unfortunately the game data is non-free and not suitable for distribution.

The long term goal should be to identify free game content for LGeneral. It seems it is not impossible because of various self-made scenarios created by the Panzer General community. However it is difficult to find the original creators. Many of the available mods and scenarios have no license at all.

The actual version in Debian (1.1.1 released in 2004!) is outdated and needs a major update. There is work in progress to update the Debian package to version 1.2.3 and to reintroduce the game data converter lgc-pg. See also 465942.

So far it seems that LGeneral 1.2.3 will work with the original Panzer General data but addons and scenarios offered on the official sourceforge homepage of lgeneral are not free respectively are not licensed and can't be used for a free data package.

Installation

You have to add contrib to your sources.list and install lgeneral the usual way.

aptitude install lgeneral

To play the old Panzer General campaign you have to install lgc-pg. This tool converts the original game data to LGeneral's native file format.

Example

Converts all data from the original CD-ROM

lgc-pg -s /mnt/windows/DAT /usr/share/games/lgeneral

pg-data.tar.gz from lgeneral.sourceforge.net

Download the pg-data.tar.gz and extract it. Then use lgc-pg to convert the data.

lgc-pg -s pg-data /usr/share/games/lgeneral

Gameplay

Start the game. The ingame menu is visible if you make a right-click with your mouse. The following options are available.

If you experience problems with your screen resolution then it is possible to change it under options. 1024x768 in fullscreen is sufficient to enjoy the game. Finally you can choose to start the campaign or to load a single scenario.

The first step is to deploy your forces and to change the starting position. As the game is turn-based you have to move your units first by left-clicking on them and sending them to a hexagon field in reach. If this field adjoins with an enemy unit you can optionally attack it. A red crosshair will show up and signal that your unit is prepared to attack.

Most of the time LGeneral is a race against your turn limit. The more skilled you are in prevailing against your enemy the more units will join you in the ongoing campaign and new opportunities will arise to change the course of further battles.

Tips & Tricks

Coming soon.

Development

The original source tarball at http://lgames.sourceforge.net has to be repacked because it contains non-free files.

Included are the sources for:

  1. lgeneral
  2. lgc-pg
  3. lgeneral-redit
  4. lged
  5. shptool
  6. ltrextract

The developer of LGeneral has confirmed that lgeneral-redit is obsolete nowadays. The same goes for lged, shptool and ltrextract. These are command line tools which can manipulate the conversion of the original Panzer General files into LGeneral's native file format. The command line tools build from source, lgeneral-redit does not. It seems neither compatible with GTK-2 nor GTK-3.

Also included is an embedded copy of GNU gettext. To remove it one needs to patch the make files. Question is keep it or patch the sources?

Links

Official Homepage of LGeneral

Panzer General fan sites


CategoryGame