wanderer

Wanderer text-based boulderdash clone game

This program requires the header files string.h and curses.h, and the curses and termcap libraries libcurses.a and libtermcap.a. If your system doesn't have them then you might as well give up now.

Still here? Good - then everything's OK.

First thing to do is edit the wand_head.h file. Most of the filenames are self-explanatory - the lock file is usually in /tmp , you probably dont need to change it. SCREENPATH is the directory in which the screen files, screen.* , are kept. HISCOREPATH is the name of the hiscore table file - this will be created when you run the program, but must have group and other read and write permission. Also, the directory SCREENPATH is used to hold the credits file.

The masterpassword is the password that you can give when you try to jump screen with ~ (see file wand.info) that will allow you to go to any screen at will. This is for wanderer 'wizards' only. Separate passwords for each screen are drawn from the file /usr/dict/words - if you dont have it on your system then you'll have to change the file jump.c . These passwords are given to the player upon completing each screen. The passwords can be disabled by creating a file in the SCREENPATH directory called no_pws .

New screens can be created by using the editor (thanx play@nl.cwi) that is built into the game. You enter it with the -e flag, and the screen you edit is held in the file ./screen . To add this one to the others, place it in the SCREENPATH directory with a name of the form screen.* , making sure that it is readable by everyone and that the screens number is subsequent to the last of the screens already held in the directory. Screens may be tested with either 'p' or 'n', and by using 'm' the number of moves for the screen may be altered.

The hiscore table holds only one entry per username - this is to prevent one or two people from taking over the entire table. If you object to this feature, it is easily removed from the scores.c file. The table can also be edited by the 'wizard' using the -m flag. This prompts for the masterpassword before allowing you to remove any entry by typing its number. Use '0' to exit the editor.

Not much more to say, really. Info on playing the game can be found in the wand.info file. Once you have edited the header file, just type 'make' to run the makefile. You may need to edit the makefile so that it conforms with your system. If you dont know how to do this, there's bound to be someone around who does.

Compiling

Under Linux, you will need GCC, ncurses-devel, and make.

Edit wand_head.h and change at least HISCOREPATH, SCREENPATH, and anything else that looks wrong. Make sure that the directory SCREENPATH exists and holds the screens. Create an empty file for the hiscore file.

Run make and it should build in a second or two. Ignore the various warnings.

Now you should be able to run wanderer. If the screens are unavailable it will give you an error.

There seems to be something weird in the environment variable retrieval that doesnt work properly under 64bit GCC; you get an invalid pointer for the name which segfaults when writing the highscore or the goodbye message.

Environment variables

Wanderer uses several of these. Here they are...

SAVEFILE ---- the path of the file to be used for saved games
NEWKEYS  ---- if you want to redefine the keys
NEWNAME, NAME, USER ---- scanned in that order to get a name for the hiscore
                     table.

The MSDOS port and save routines are courtesy of Greg Margo, who has also tidied up a lot of my messy programming :-). Any problems with them, send to HIM, since I wont know what to do.

All that remains is for me to say that the source was written by me, Steven Shipway, on a sun/3-160 called poppy at Warwick University. The latter are completely unaware of this major breakthrough in software design (:-), and this is probably a good idea, since they may well disapprove of this use of computing time and facilities! (Only kidding)

Summary of flags:

-c  Reads credits file from SCREENPATH/credits
-s  Shows hiscore table from HISCOREPATH
-e  Enters screen editor working on file ./screen
-m  Enters hiscore table editor after prompting for the MASTERPASSWORD
-f  Starts game with map-type screen instead of normal screen - although I
    personally think this makes the game too easy...
-v  Prints version
-t  Tests the screen
-r Record mode. Records keypresses into the given file