Description

(click for large image, 58KB)

FooBillard (official home page: http://foobillard.sunsite.dk/) is a free (GPL2) OpenGL billiard game for Linux by Florian Berger. It has nice graphics, realistic physics, AI-player and different game types: 8-ball, 9-ball, carambol and snooker. I have ported it to the Win32 platform, running it on the default OpenGL DLL library and SDL. FooBillard for Win32 also uses freetype, libpng and zlib. This port is not exact, because certain features had to be disabled, left out or were not implemented for Win32 platforms. Port done exclusively on Msys+Mingw and SciTE.

Download

The Win32 port (currently Version 3.0, Release 1, uploaded on 2004-04-23) can be downloaded from FooBillard's SourceForge Project Summary page or FooBillard's SourceForge ports page:

• Win32 port Version 3.0 Release 1 file list
• Link to download the version 3.0 Win32 binary (zip archive 1406KB)

A source file set is available from the SF pages if you want to compile it on your own. FooBillard is best played on Linux with a GeForce2 class or better graphics card and OpenGL libraries with 3D acceleration.

Foobillard summary information can be found on Freshmeat and FSF's Software Directory.

Implementation Notes

What has been fixed in Win32 Release 1 for FB 3.0 (versus Win32 Release 2 for FB 2.9):

• Most of FooBillard's features works, with some quirks.
• For non-Win32 specific changes from 2.9 to 3.0, please see the official page.
• Enabled multitextures (cloth effect) for cards with OpenGL drivers that support it.
• Rendered+fresnel reflections works on Nvidia cards that can handle vertex programs.
• Bump mapping should also work on suitable Nvidia cards, but I haven't tested it.

If your graphics card and its Win32 OpenGL driver does not support advanced visual effects, then FooBillard should ignore the high-quality display settings and still work correctly. The port is quite (but not perfectly) stable. Network play has not been tested. It links with the Win32 sockets library only.

If you can contribute a working fix for the network multiplayer mode for Win32, you are most welcome.

Win32-specific bug reports are welcome; please send it to [email protected] (remove 'nospam' when mailing.) I am bandwidth-challenged, so my response time will not be instantaneous. Patches or files to implement missing features for the Win32 port are also welcome.