GearHead Caramel
GearHead Caramel- Third game in the GearHead series, first written in Python.
To install, just unzip the standalone distribution to a convenient place and double click "ghcaramel". To do a DIY installation from source code, see the instructions below.
CONTROLS
Most things in GearHead Caramel are done using the mouse, but there are keyboard shortcuts for some. Note that commands are case sensitive- "Q" is different from "q".
Left click: Move to spot
Right click: Open skills menu during exploration
c: Center the screen on the party/active character
Q: Quit the game.
H: Open the Field HQ (Exploration mode only)
m: Browse memos (Exploration mode only)
In the attack/skill/EWar interface, click the name of your weapon/skill/program to change to a different one. You can scroll through weapons and attack options using the mouse wheel or the arrow keys.
In the combat movement interface, click the movemode to change movemode.
TROUBLESHOOTING
All of your user files are contained in a special folder.
- On Windows, this folder is called "ghcaramel_user" and you can find it in the game install directory.
- On every other OS, this folder is called "ghcaramel" and you can find it in your home directory.
There's a text file there called "config.cfg" that contains many options for customizing the game. You can also delete or back up your save files from here, if you are the sort of person who would do such a thing.
If you get a black screen and then the game crashes, set fullscreen to False in the configuration file. This is a known issue with PyGame on certain systems. Hopefully it will be fixed at some point in time but for now I have set the default configuration to run in windowed mode.
If you have trouble running ghcaramel on MacOS, you may need to set the executable permission on the file (chmod a+x ghcaramel) or configure MacOS gatekeeper to allow it to run.
If you get a "permission denied" error on Linux, you may need to set the executable permission on the file. Right click the ghcaramel file and open the properties. Make sure "allow this file to run as a program" is enabled under "Permissions".
If you double click on ghcaramel and instead of running it tries to open the program file in Mousepad, then congratulations! You are apparently using XUbuntu which is the same OS I use, but I have no idea why it's doing this strange thing. You can get around this by running the program from a terminal or making a shortcut for it on your desktop/app menu.
If the game crashes when you try to open the configuration menu, probably you have an old config file from a previous installation. Delete config.cfg from your user directory and reload ghcaramel.
Campaign files prior to v0.900 will not load. You can load the file in a previous version of the game, enable dev mode, and eject the character by pressing "E" while in exploration mode. Then go back and turn dev mode off; that mode can mess up your game in 47,000 different ways. Character files prior to v0.900 should still work.
If you are playing the game on Steam on Linux or a SteamOS device, it's possible that characters and campaigns started from a different GearHead Caramel install will not load. Open the config file and turn on dev mode. Then, from the main menu of the non-Steam install, select the option "Steam My Eggs". This will convert all of the save files so they'll be compatible with Steam. Note that it still can't fix campaign files from before v0.900. After that turn off dev mode, since you don't need that kind of trouble in your life.
If you have a different problem, you can file a bug report at https://github.com/jwvhewitt/gearhead-caramel/issues
BUILDING FROM SOURCE
Things have gotten a bit more complicated since the last time I updated this file. To build GearHead Caramel from source, first you will need to install Python3. After that you need to install the PyGame, Numpy, and Cython packages. The easiest way to install these is with "pip". You may also need to install a C compiler for Cython; see the Cython page for details.
Before running the program for the first time, you need to build the caramel-recolor-cython package. Open a terminal in the caramel-recolor-cython folder and type:
python setup.py install
Depending on your system, you may need to type "python3" instead of "python". Once this package is installed, you can run main.py to play the game. If you are getting a "permissions denied" error, or you want to keep things local, use this command instead:
python setup.py install --user
Once pbgerecolor has been built + installed you can run the main.py script directly. There is a cx_Freeze setup.py script in the root folder which may be used to build + install an executable version of GearHead Caramel; if you figure that out then more power to you. GearHead Caramel also works with pyInstaller, and there's a spec script as well.
python main.py
The first time it's run, the game will create a "ghcaramel" folder in your home directory (or "My Documents" on Windows) and place a configuration file there. This is where all of your characters and saved games are stored, in case you want to delete them or make backups. The configuration file can be edited in any text editor.