Best Curses Game: Kevin Pulo School of Information Technologies Madsen Building F09 University of Sydney, NSW, 2006 Australia http://www.kev.pulo.com.au/ Judge's Remarks: To build: make kev Try: ./kev and then in another window, ./kev localhost Continuing with this year's "retro game" theme, this is another old game; arguably, one of the oldest. Requires a functioning network, and curses. The graphics aren't the impressive part; the graphics and network are. How many games come out at $50 and still require you to wait for a patch to come out before you can play multiplayer? This one works out of the box. Selected Author's Comments: NETWORK P*NG! [=================] Kevin Pulo kev@pulo.com.au REQUIREMENTS ------------ * TCP sockets * curses * usleep DESCRIPTION ----------- This program is a two-player networked version of the eighties arcade classic, "pong". It uses standard TCP sockets to communicate over the net, and ncurses for display. It supports variable terminal sizes (though both players must have the same terminal size) and game speeds. Each player has a paddle to hit the ball, and you get points for getting the ball past your opponent's paddle. It's pretty fun! :) RUNNING ------- Run the server first without any command line arguments, ie. ./kev Then run the client with a single command line argument which is the name of the machine running the server, eg. ./kev localhost Make sure that the terminals on both ends are the same size. Also, the TCP port number specified in the build file mustn't be blocked by a firewall. Here's a good quick example to see it in action on your own machine, assuming you have Xwindows: xterm -geometry 80x40 -fg green -bg black -fn 9x15bold -e ./kev & xterm -geometry 80x40 -fg green -bg black -fn 9x15bold -e ./kev localhost& PLAYING ------- Your paddle is the one at the bottom of the screen, your opponent is at the top. To move your paddle left, hold down ',' (ie. '<' but don't press shift). To move your paddle right, hold down '.'. To quit, either player may press 'q'. The current score is shown on the left side of the halfway line. Your score is the lower number, your opponents score is the upper number. Your score is the number of times your opponent has missed the ball. You can control the speed of the ball by the motion of your paddle when the ball hits it. If your paddle is still, then the ball just bounces normally off it. If your paddle is moving in the same direction as the ball, then the ball's speed in that direction will increase. If your paddle is moving in the opposite direction to the ball, then the ball's speed in that direction will decrease (or if the ball is going slowly enough, it'll turn around). You might want to increase your keyboard repeat rate before playing. On the Linux console try "kbdrate -r 24.0 -d 250" (kbdrate might be "hidden" from normal users in /sbin, and you might need to be root anyway), in Xwindows try "xset r rate 250 24" (find out your current rate first with "xset q", so that you can reset it later). Look below in the Building section for info on how to speed up or slow down the game (useful if your increase or decrease the terminal size). BUILDING -------- Just run the Makefile as above. The "SPEED" variable in the Makefile controls the speed of the game (defaults to 50). This speed is the delay between frames in milliseconds. Thus a value of 0 will make the game go as fast as your network can handle, and values less than 50 are useful for larger terminals or more exciting games. The program needs bandwidth equal to 1/s bytes per second (where "s" is the speed value). Any latency on the network will be added to s - so you should probably subtract any latency from the value of s you want to have. Given that loopback and fast Ethernet LANs are both much less than 1ms of latency, you should only need to worry about this if you plan on playing over a slower link like a cable modem, DSL, or (God-forbid) dialup. The TCP port to use for network communications is specified by the "PORT" variable in the Makefile. If the default of 5455 is blocked for whatever reason, you can change it to something else. Of course if you use a port < 1024, you'll need to be root. OBFUSCATION ----------- The program's broad structure is fairly straightforward, but individual tasks are rarely done in a straightforward manner. ;) Identifier names have mostly been chosen to resemble paddles and balls, and to generally decrease readability. The source has been cleverly formatted to resemble one of the paddles from the game, rotated 90 degrees. ;) (The "source paddle" has approximately the same aspect ratio as the game at 80 columns wide, which is 1:10.) Finally, the number of "non-whitespace characters" (as defined by the rules) in the file is exactly 2048, which I think is rather unexpectedly cool. :) BUGS ---- There are 3 warnings when I compile with gcc 2.95.3 (-Wall -ansi -pedantic) on my Linux system, but all are completely harmless. I don't like the curses and/or termcaps/terminfos on IRIX and Solaris (the only two non-Linux systems I have access to). Despite calling timeout(0), notimeout(win, TRUE), nodelay(win, TRUE) and/or keypad(win, FALSE), it still seems to force a delay into calls to getch() - I'm guessing at a termcap/terminfo level. At any rate, I can't seem to force no delay. This is a shame, because it basically plays havoc with the input code, particularly the read-ahead canceller. It still works, but not nearly as well (keypresses are dodgey and holding down keys doesn't always work), and so I _much_ prefer and recommend Linux libncurses. Sometimes when 'q' is pressed in one, the other will crash out with "Broken pipe". If the specified port can't be bound or connected to, the program segfaults. If your terminal is too wide (we're talking gigantic here - over 500 characters wide) then the program can segfault. It's also possible to crash the program a player scores over a billion points (1e9). Maybe you can consider that the goal... ;) If you run the client and server on different architectures, both architectures need to have the same character systems (ie. don't try mixing ASCII and EBCDIC). It is independent of endianness though.