THE RUBY CAST DEMO 0.2          By Lance Ewing <be@ihug.co.nz>
======================

 I have decided it is about time to release the second demo for my game "The
Ruby Cast" as I had promised I would. Hopefully this will encourage others
like David Smith and Nuno Costa to release their second demos as well so we
can see how things are progressing.

 I have done a bit more to it than I originally intended for this demo. On
the message board I said there wouldn't be many new puzzles and that it would
essentially be a scenic extension, but as I went along I kept adding puzzles
that weren't there in the original design. The result is that the game has
over twice as many puzzles as the earlier demo had.

 In the final game you will be required to find the fourteen gold coins and
place them into the ruby cast. However, in this version of the demo, there
are no coins that you can get at this stage. There are some very close by,
in fact you might be able to guess where a couple of them might be, but at
this stage you havn't got the tools necessary to find them.

 What I plan to do from now on is to release a new version of the demo for
every eight or ten rooms that I add. This means that by the time I reach
version 1.0 of the demo, it should be almost the complete game. In this way,
people that download the game can test it as we go along and problems can be
indentified and corrected. Suggestions can also be made about animations or
pictures that look a bit messy, and other cosmetic features.


KNOWN PROBLEMS

 This release is probably full of bugs but the one that I do know about
occurs when you are in debug mode. If you use the debug commands 'get object'
or 'gimme gimme' and then view the inventory item, the text shown will be
garbage and the interpreter will die a horrible death. My advice to you is
to not cheat at this stage.

 If you find any other bugs with this release, please tell me. I've tried
to fix all the bugs that people reported last time, but if you see that a
bug still exists that you told me about, please let me know again.


RUNNING THE DEMO

 A number of people have sent me emails asking how to run the demo. This pack
only contains the data files. For obvious legal reasons I can't distribute
Sierras interpreter files with the pack. You can find those files as part of
an existing AGI game that you own or as part of a Sierra demo such as those
available on Peter Kellys site. The demo is designed to work with versions
2.915, 2.917 and 2.936 of Sierras AGI interpreter. Using earlier versions
could cause problems.

 So, to get the demo working:

 (1) Create a directory for the demo (e.g. RUBY).
 (2) Unzip the pack into this directory.
 (3) Copy the AGI file, the SIERRA.COM, and all the *.OVL files of a Sierra
     game or demo into the same directory.
 (4) Execute SIERRA.COM and you're away.


 If you can't find the SIERRA.COM file, it could also be named after the name
of the game that it came from, e.g KQ3.COM or SQ.COM. Some games
also combine the AGI and SIERRA.COM file into one executable. In this case,
copy that file instead.


