FAQ

Besides the 22 tested and cleaned up levels of the first island that come with Pingus. There are also around 120 levels that might be playable and another 100 levels that are incomplete at the moment. These levels can be found in the data/levels/playable and data/levels/wip/ (wip = work in progress) directories:

data/levels/playable/

The levels in the playable/ directory might be playable, but there is no guarantee for that. They might been broken due to engine changes, they might be far too easy or far too hard or simply incomplete.

data/levels/wip/

The wip/ directory contains levels that are not playable at all. Some of them might even lack entrances and/or exits. Don't be surprised that you can't play them. Instead, these levels can be used as starting points for levels you want to create yourself with the level editor.

There are two ways to start the levels. The first one is to do it simply via the command line:

pingus data/levels/playable/somelevel.pingus

The other, probably more userfriendly, way is to simply load them into the level editor and then click the play button.

There are multiple ways to tune the running speed of Pingus.
Firstly, reducing the screen colour depth (to 16bit, for example) on a slower computer might give you a boost of around 50% percent, depending on your hardware. X11 doesn't allow switching color depth at run time, and the exact instructions for doing this are outside of the scope of this FAQ. Consult your distribution documentation for more information.

Secondly, a gain in speed can be achieved by reducing the display resolution of Pingus. For example, if you want to run Pingus at 640x480 you can do this with the following command:

pingus -g 640x480

Thirdly, you can run Pingus in a fast-mode. This mode disables all costly particle effects and the background. Thus, Pingus will look less pretty, but will probably be a good amount faster. Fast-mode can be turned on with:

pingus --fast-mode

Remember, the fast-mode has lots of room for improvement. If it doesn't help you make Pingus run fast enough, not all is lost.

If that is not enough, you might also want to play with the min-frame-skip and max-frame-skip options. Both should result in a more uniform frame-rate. This can make the game jerky, but playability can be improved nonetheless.

Finally, the 'F11' key can help you a great deal in your optimisation process by showing the frame-rate counter.