SPACEWAR version 1.11 Copyright 1989, Jeff Petkau Program by Jeff Petkau Graphics by Brian Fehdrau This program may be copied and distributed via bulletin boards, online services, disk collections, or any other means, with the following restrictions: 1. No fee may be charged for distribution except to cover the cost of media, shipping, or online time. 2. No additional copyright of any sort may be claimed over it. 3. The complete, original archive must be distributed. You may convert the archive to other formats, such as lhz and zip, but all files in it must be included unmodified. There is no restriction on how much money you can send me after trying this program and deciding that it is the greatest thing you have ever seen. However, different sums will get different results: - Send me $100.00 and you will receive a bound copy of the 150-page manual and maybe a free subscription to "Spacewar" magazine. - Send me $20.00 and I'll order myself a pizza. - Send me $5.00 and I'll tell everyone that you are cheap. - Send me no money and I won't even know that you exist; you will spend the rest of your days wandering in despair. Jeff Petkau 829 3rd Street East Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada S7H 1M6 This .zoo should contain the following files: readme 10775 bytes SpaceWar 38028 bytes SpaceWar.info 398 bytes damage.8svx 15648 bytes engine.8svx 18134 bytes entdeath.8svx 16500 bytes entfire.8svx 3176 bytes klindeath.8svx 4904 bytes klinfire.8svx 1408 bytes swabout.ilbm 3558 bytes swcoalesce.ilbm 14196 bytes swmoon.ilbm 5488 bytes swnumber.ilbm 644 bytes swships.ilbm 17532 bytes swsun.ilbm 956 bytes swtitle.ilbm 2070 bytes swtransport.ilbm 4880 bytes History 1.11 Version 1.11 is basically the same as 1.10, except that I have moved up to Manx 5.0a and no doubt introduced all kinds of new bugs in the process. This release was delayed about three months because I was going to locate and fix all those bugs, but I never got around to it. So basically this is 1.10 with some really minor changes and a bunch of new bugs. 1.10 Many many many changes from 1.0. Since hardly anyone has ever seen 1.0, I won't list them here. 1.0 I wrote this game about two years ago, and ever since then have been delaying releasing it because I kept wanting to add one more feature. Somewhere along the line, I decided to try to sell it to a magazine (Amiga Resource, to be specific) since I figured I'd get more money out of that than shareware. Soon after, I discovered that a beta version had already made it at least as far as Georgia, so I had to scrap that idea. I then continuted to hold off releasing it until I could get a digitizer and record some decent sounds. I still haven't got a digitizer, and I'm still using rotten sounds, but I really don't care any more. So here it is. The Game To start SpaceWar from the CLI, change your current directory to wherever the sound and graphics files are and start the program. The default stack should be big enough. To start from the Workbench, click on the icon. The sound and graphics files must be in the same directory as the program and icon. SpaceWar is a two player game. One player controls the Enterprise, the other the Klingon ship. Why the little triangle is always called the Klingon, I do not know. The object is to shoot the other player (no kidding). One point is scored when you kill the other player. The game ends when a player reaches fifty points. Each player can have a maximum of eight shots out at once, or twelve if you count the fragments from an explosion. Menu Options Game pause [TAB] Pause. new Start a new game. about... Display vital information. quit Quit the program. Options rapid fire When selected, hold down trigger for rapid fire. black hole Makes sun invisible. Shots can pass a bit closer to it without being destroyed, but ships will still be ripped apart by the gravity. If there is no gravity, then the sun is gone; objects can safely pass through where it isn't. asteroid Causes a small round asteroid to orbit the sun. space Controls the size of space. At the larger settings, ships can go some distance past the edges of the screen before they hit the end of the universe. edges Controls what happens when ships (and shots) hit the aforementioned edge of the universe. "Wrap" means they simply come in the other side, retaining their original velocity. "Bounce" means they bounce off. "Nasty" causes shots to disappear and ships to be annihilated. gravity Controls the strength of gravity. If gravity is set to "none" and the sun is invisible ("black hole") then there is no sun at all. thrust Controls the strength of ship thrusters. Control Use this menu to select which controls control which ship. Joystick 1 and 2 are pretty obvious. The keyboard controls are keypad 4 and 6 to turn, keypad 8 to thrust and keypad 5 to fire. Select "Remote" after establishing a modem connection to indicate that the other player is controlling this ship. "Computer" is inactive at the moment, and is there mainly to remind me to get around to adding a computer-controlled ship. Remote begin remote Opens the serial device and displays the chat lines on the screen so that you can talk to your modem. end remote Closes the serial device and removes the chat lines. baud rate You figure it out. chat lines These two options control the number of lines of chat text visible on the screen. The top text is incoming chat, the bottom is outgoing. Sound load sounds This attempts to load all the sound files from disk. See below for more info. There are hotkeys for some menu items, but they aren't visible in the menus because they looked like hell (colors all wrong). pause TAB newgame A N quit A Q about HELP begin remote A R end remote A E load/unload sounds A S Sound All game sounds are loaded from 8SVX sound files when the "load sounds" option is selected. There are four basic sounds: FIRE.8SVX (when someone shoots), ENGINE.8SVX (the engines), DEATH.8SVX (when someone explodes), and DAMAGE.8SVX (when someone has been hit but isn't dead yet.) For each of the sounds, you can specify that only the Klingon is to use this sound by prefixing the filename with KLIN, or that only the Enterprise is to use it by prefixing the filename with ENT. For example, this archive has different explosion sounds for the two ships (ENTDEATH.8SVX and KLINDEATH.8SVX) but only one engine sound (ENGINE.8SVX). NOTE: I scavenged all of these sounds from various sources. As far as I know, none of them are copyrighted; if one of them is, please inform me and I will remove it from the archive. I would really like to digitize all the sounds myself anyway (thought you'd heard the last of that old explosion sound? Ha!) Remote Game The remote game options allow two players with Amigas to play over the phone lines (or with a null modem). The first step is for both sides to start up spacewar and select begin remote from the "Remote" menu. As long as neither ship's control is set to remote, you can use chat as a simple terminal to get your modems connected and ready to go. After you are all connected and able to chat with the other player, decide who is going to play what ship. The player with the Enterprise should select remote from the Klingon's control menu, and the player with the Klingon should set the Enterprise to remote. All options must be the same on both sides, and you cannot both be controlling the same ship. Features and Other Members of the Insect World - It flickers a lot. This gets more annoying every time I look at it, so I'll probably fix it Real Soon Now. - If there is no gravity, the moon just kind of hangs there. Enterprising players can actually push it over to where the other guy's ship appears to collect a few dozen points. Future Versions Various sorts of fuel supplies will be added, along with limits on fuel. An option for Gorfian shots. More variety when someone is hit. The arcade game was great for this. Better sounds. These ones suck. Again, the arcade game was wonderful. As soon as I get around to it, I will add some method for re-syncing the two sides in the middle of a remote game, if they get messed up. It should be fairly tolerant of line noise already, though. I can usually pick up the phone and scream without screwing it up. A four-player option, with two players on each side of a phone hookup. Speed is the main restriction here. Could also add support for a joystick parallel interface, except that I don't even know what that is. (Mr. Franklin in Georgia's idea. If he's reading this: I tried to reply, but it bounced.) Eventually, I might allow one of the ships to be computer-controlled so that you can play the game without having to find another person. Unfortunately, some really Nasty Math might be required to make the computer player even tolerably good; I'm not sure if I can do it or not. --- Jeff Petkau usenet: petkau@skdad.usask.ca no net: (306)664-3185 829 3rd Street East Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada S7H 1M6