FAQ

FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions (and Answers)

• How can I get Pingus, how much does it cost?
• Which Pingus version should I use?
• How to compiling Pingus?
• I tried compiling it, but something didn't work
• I never played Lemming^tm, what is this game all about and how do I play it?
• Why is Pingus still not done? Many years have past and it can't be that difficult to write a simple Lemmnigs clon, can it?
• Pingus runs to slowly, any way to make it faster?

Pingus is Free Software under the GNU GPL, that means everybody can download it, distribute it, modify it and even distribute modified works, as long as the source code is still provided (checkout the GNU GPL itself for more details). That also means that Pingus is available at no cost from this webpage and will be available for no cost from this website in the future. But it also means that Pingus is available from other websites and places, for example most GNU/Linux distributions contain a (sometimes outdated) version of Pingus, there might be some shareware sites which contain a version of Pingus and you can even by game-packs which contain Pingus.

But the latest version you can get from this site is the only version that is supported, so if you have another version and have some problem, the only answer you might get, is that you should get a new version from this site.

As the previous answer told you, Pingus is available from a number of places, that also means that not all places will have the most current versions, some will probally ship an outdated version or an not even working version. So if you want the newest version the official Pingus webpage will always be the best place to search for a new one.

If you are a gamer it is strongly recomment that you use only the version that is marked as playable and stable, all other versions, be it the current CVS or a beta-snapshot release, are not recomment since they will either spoil the story, new levels, gadgets and other things or confuse you with unfinised, buggy features. CVS or beta-snapshots might also delete your savegames, game statistics or do other thing that ruin your fun.

If you want to test the current development version, want to search for bugs and are prepared to find bugs it is of course recomment that you stick to a current CVS checkout or the beta-snapshots, since testing the stable version will not be of much help a few weeks after the release, since most bugs might already be fixed by then in the development versions.

If you are a developer and want to look at the code its recomment that you stick to current CVS, it might not always be 100% correct and compilable, but it should always be pretty close to it. If you encounter problems, just contact one of the authors and the problem might be fixed within a few hours.

Under GNU/Linux Pingus should be compilable like most other software, a simple ./configure && make should do. To install Pingus type make install, but that is not recomment with the development versions, since it might not work or worse do ugly things to your filesystem layout, you can just run Pingus directly from the source tree, so there is no need to install it.

But be warned, Pingus need ClanLib and Hermes to be correctly installed and to have the right version, so it might not be really trivial. Unless you are a developer or betatester it is therefore strongly recomment that you stick with the binaries that are provided in the download section of this site. If you want to compile Pingus on Win32, you will need Microsoft Visual C++ Version 6 or higher, project files are in the Pingus source tree. But again, you need ClanLib and Hermes, so it might not be really a trivial task. Pingus will currently not compile with Cygwin or Mingw, sorry, porting help is of course welcome.

First of all try to find out at which point it 'didn't work'. If it failed at the ./configure step, you might be missing a correctly installed Hermes or ClanLib, the file config.log might provide you with more infos. If it fails at make time it is most likly a bug in the source, such as some C++ construct that requires a g++ larger than 3.0, some simple typo, a missing include or other things that might not show up on the developers machine, a bug report is very welcome in such cases. Make sure that you include the exact error message and version of Pingus and ClanLib in your bug report.

If Pingus compiled fine, but failed at startup with a message like Couldn't open libsomething.so, you most likly havn't run ldconfig after installing ClanLib or /usr/local/lib is missing from your /etc/ld.so.conf, in that case ldconfig won't look at the correct places to find the librarys.

A game manual along with a tutorial is planed and might be released together with the next version. Please be patient.

Well, there are several factors which took Pingus to take that long and still cause many delays. First of all Pingus was my first larger C++ project, so it was after all a project for myself to learn C++, but that also caused a lot of things to be done wrong which I needed to rewrite or fix at a later point. Pingus also as the problem of being over-enginired at a few points, to much abstraction at places way it doesn't make sense and only causes problems. So in the end there was lot of cruft collected in the first two years which needed to be cleaned up in the next years. At this point the code is a lot cleaner than back than, but still has some ugly points in it which needs to be fixed before the next release.
Beside the ugly-code issue one also has to see that Pingus is a huge game, it isn't a small game like a simple Tetris clone. It contains close to 800 uniq graphics, 200 levels and 50'000 lines of code, all these aren't created over night. It might have been possible to create this in a year, but motivation comes and goes and so there where month were simply nothing happens and weeks were large parts of the code got restructured or rewritten.
Beside all that its you that could make the development go faster by contributing something to the project. You don't need coding skills for that, play testing the beta versions alone could be a big help if you send in helpfull comments.

There are multiple ways to tune Pingus speed. First of if your computer is to slow and runs at 24 or 32bit color depth switching it down to 16bit might give you a boost of around 50% percent, depending on your hardware. X11 doesn't allow switching color depth at run time, so well this is a bit ugly.
If you can't switch down the color depth, don't want to or it is still to slow you can switch down Pingus to 640x480, that can be done by starting it via:
pingus -g 640x480
If that still doesn't help you can run Pingus in fast-mode, it disables all costly particle effects and the background, thus Pingus will look more ugly, but will probally be a good amount faster. Fast-mode can be turned on with:
pingus --fast-mode
You might also play with the min-frame-skip and max-frame-skip options, both should result in a more uniform frame-rate, even so it will be a bit more jerky, but playablility can be increased by that non the less.
You can also of course combine all the above and with 'F11' you can enable the frame-counter which should help you optimizing the game. If you have a good config for your system, please mail it to Ingo Ruhnke along with a description of your system. At a later point all this might probally get auto-detected and the fast-mode also contains lots of room for optimizations, so if it is stil not fast enough not all is lost.