bob!

bob
Copyright © 2001 Kuno Woudt(aka warp of bliss).

table of contents

• introduction
• system requirements
• linux port
• command line options
• story
• options
• playing the game
• powerups
• score
• credits
• greetings and thanks
• links
• license and disclaimer
• eof

Hi!

You're reading the readme for bob, which is a 32k game for the game compo at mekka & symposium 2001. bob is heavily inspired by jawbreaker (on commodore 64), it can be considered as a pc re-implementation for two players.

Don't hesitate to send me a message if you're having trouble with this release, or want to send me feedback in the form of flames or patches or whatnot.

-- warp of bliss.

ps. fxmp doesn't play the tunes entirely as intended - most players don't - so please have a listen in FastTracker 2 if you have any interest in chip music. The original .xm's are in src/data.src/.

This game tries to run in a 400x300 256 colour videomode, if it cannot obtain this it will fall back to a windowed mode which emulates the 256 colour mode on top of a 15/16/24 or 32 bit mode.

I guess you need about 166mhz or 200mhz if your system supports the 400x300 8bpp mode (most of it runs fine on my 133mhz pentium, but some of the powerups are a bit sluggish on that box :). If the windowed mode is used you need a faster machine.

Other then that you currently need Microsoft DirectX 7 (or, if you're brave enough - you can try the Linux/GGI port).

Also, this game tries to do its timing on the vertical retrace, so if you can adjust it somewhere you're advised to set the refreshrate in 400x300 to 70hz for smooth display.

Smoke was kind enough to port my DirectDraw and Direct Input code to GGI. There are still strange bugs due to the nature of GGI and DirectInput.

To build bob cd into src/GNU and type make. You can also try make release if you want to compress the binary with upx.

Bob will should run as intended using the svgalib target, but this is untested :), use 8bpp or GGI_DISPLAY=palemu in X.

For smooth display in X you may need to change the scheduling in the linux kernel - change the #define HZ 100 into something like 1024 in linux/include/asm-i386/param.h.

With command line options you can force quiet mode and/or windowed mode, e.g.

d:\ms2001\32kgame> bob in a window, please.

or

d:\ms2001\32kgame> bob could you be quiet?

or both

d:\ms2001\32kgame> bob --window --quiet

once upon a time there was a snowman. a snowman called bob, which is a very good name for a snowman. this snowman called bob had a friend called bob. which seems rather confusing, but bob didn't mind, and neither did bob.

one day, bob and bob had an argument, and they stopped talking to each other. but then they got real lonely on christmas, and so both of them decided to make a new friend out of snow. when bob saw what bob was doing things got really ugly while both of them tried to sabotage the other's progress...

so, this is where you people come in, please help bob and bob create their friend out of snow.

Before you start playing you should configure the players (select options -> p1 setup):

• keymap: select qwerty or dvorak (sorry, no german, french, italian, etc. keymap support).
• name: enter your name.
• controls: game controls, note that the action and escape keys are only used in the menus and not in the game itself.
• radix: select binary, octal, decimal or hexadecimal display for score and powerup timeouts.

When you've configured both players choose save setup to save this configuration - it will be automatically loaded the next time you run the game.

Now, select start game to start. The objective is to gather all snow on your half of the screen. you will encounter evil mutant snowmen which are best avoided and the obligatory powerups, described below.

The game ends when either player dies or gathers all snow.

To control your character, just press a key once. So, if you want to go up, press the up key once, bob will wait for a hole to come by and go up when he's allowed to do so (move right or left to cancel it). Press left once for left, and if you want bob to stop press left again. Same principle for right and down (the action and escape keys aren't used in the game).

A number of delicious powerups will appear magically in the game arena, they all have an effect on either you or your opponent for a certain amount of time (and other powerups cannot be used on this player while such a timer is active).

reverse: reverse the opponents keys.
hole: remove your horizontal bars.
food: you are able to eat the evil mutants.
drug: drug your opponent.
zoom: obscure your opponents vision.
gravity: opponent falls down to bottom row.
prison: lock the opponent on the current row.
speedup: you move twice as fast.

Here's a list of things which increase your score (points in decimal):

• + 1 point for eating a dot of snow.
• +30 points for eating all snow.
• +20 points for the opponent if you die.
• +10 points for eating an evil mutant snowman (during food! powerup).
• +10 points for a narrow escape (moving up/down with an evil mutant snowman near).

• code: warp.
• graphics and design: warp.
• music: tharsis.
• music player: fxmp by spectre of flare.
• beta testing: cougar, mugshot.

(game concept based on jawbreaker)

Greetings to: avoozl, burp, cavey, jylam, mooz, rigel, smoke, spectre, violator, xef4, zarq, everyone else in #demoscene, all the people here at MS2001, and all I forgot.

special thanks to some folks who provided valuable suggestions:

• ir for explaining the details of how char * foo = "bar"; works in .c.
• smoke for some excellent optimization suggestions.
• avoozl for pointing out I should use volatile.

This program was compressed with The Ultimate Packer for eXecutables by Markus Oberhumer & Laszlo Molnar, which is available at upx.tsx.org.

For more opensource demoscene related stuff try some stuff by ecfh, flare or bliss.

Also visit Jylam's lnxscene.org and Smoke's #demoscene on openprojects irc to get a glimpse of the opensource and linux demo communities.

This file is part of bob, a 32k game for Mekka & Symposium 2001.
Copyright 2001 Kuno Woudt

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program (see the file copying.txt); if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

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