lr-05-apr-2001.tgz lr-29-mar-2001.tgz
The source code exhibits an odd style I discovered while reading the source to BoboBot. It breaks many CS truisms, but I felt that it was quite understandable and rather aesthetic. The style is Bill Kendrick's.
Interesting things about the BoboBot source:
->,
and * only appears in char*.int or void.Here are some of the documentation images:
#define PARTICLE 0 and
#define WAVE 1.
Nodes will have to be expanded (I need to do this so that
I can set "goal" nodes anyways) to support a "become a node" flag,
and I'll need to add a "fill_array_with_nodes_within_circle"
routine accepting a point, a radius, and an array of integers
to fill with node indexes. (Look at Bonobo source to see where
similar things were done.)
A game called Light Rains, a pun on "Light Trains". Also could be called "Light Racer" (tribute to BumpRace[r]), Photon Racer, or something along the line of Neutrinos- slightly massive light. Netrino, or NeutRally- a pun on "Neutrally".
In the game, 1-4 players see a tight closeup (like Defender 2000) of a massive schematic-like or electric-board-like playing field, with lots of grid and landmark so that speed can be seen, and to add ambience. Tracks are present in the board, and probably glow a little bit, so that they are differentiable from the background art, which should be slightly dim, but have some kind of ominous TRON pulse.
Four player games split the screen into 4 with a score bar in the middle of the screen, splitting the top two players and the lower two players.
Three player games change one of the player boxes into a place for scores; the score bar is gome.
Two player games split the screen in two either horizontally or vertically, with a score bar in the split.
The game is vector based, with lots of neat particle special effects. Jeff Minter would be proud.
You can play 1:1:1:1, 2:2, 1:1:1, 1:1, or single player.
The background glistens in a crystalline silicon way.
High conductivity regions (gold paths) speed the player up. Superconducting is the highest conductivity regions. Resistor regions slow the player down. These shouldn't just apply to the player, but to any electrical phenomena in the game.
Most paths are copper (and have a copper color). One speed up is silver, another speed up is gold. Highest speed is "SuperConductor", find the name of a good superconductor.
A running Ohm-meter lets you know how fast you are going. Fewer ohms means greater speed. There is a continual +-1% fluctation in speed, allowing players to get a temporary temporal advantage over their mates.
Transistor regions: [semi-conductors] If a player takes a base path (for some bonus), players that follow for the next few seconds gain a speed increase going through the emitter path..! [for a net betterment] (Self balancing game element.)
There are various switching events that can happen, and they play off tit-for-tat situations. They function a little different depending on how many players are playing. For example, suppose there are two paths you can go down. One is disadvantageous, the other advantageous. If only one player goes down the disadvantageous path, though, the other player's passing a specific location cause the disadvantageous path to become advantagesous. Perhaps there are tracks that rotate, allowing a bridge to appear, or something.
"Wave" power- you can reduce your energy to become like a wave, unbounded by the track. This is a good way to make "hops" from track to track. You move slow, and you move out, but you appear on the next closest track (other than the one you started on). Sometimes you can decide to "low-energy", and sometimes you are forced to.
Lines can have "drift". If a speeder races through an area, there is a drift behind the player that other players, if they get into, can go faster. But if a player goes down a drift the wrong way, they go slower..! If a bunch of players go down a path one way, and then one goes back the other way, they have to fight the drift to get back. This makes going back down a bad path that a lot of players went down a bad/hard idea. Perhaps drift should be called "magnetization."
There can be gates. If a player enters and and gate, the player is "stuck" in there. They may back out the way they came in, or wait for another player to come in on a second track, and the two will leave at the same time, on the same track. XOR gates make it so that if a player comes in, another player cannot go through the other track.
Perhaps for team games (2 on 2), there should be positrons and electrons. Positrons and electrongs collide with each other in a flash, effectively restarting each player. If they go through a NOT gate, they flip allegience- positrons become electrons, and electrons become positrons. Not realistic, but interesting. Polarity causes magnetization to have opposite effects.
Bit showers occasionally happen. The entire grid has a bunch of waves appear, which strech out to the nearest wire, and then follow tracks for a while before they eventually die out. While on the tracks, they magnetize it in various directions. If a player rolls over a bit shower drop-turned solid, perhaps something bad/good happens in addition to the magnetization effect.
The game should be very fast paced, rather random, and should require constant attention to the details and manipulations. Mastering a board should take a while. The game should feel something akin to air-traffic-controller (ATC), the popular UNIX game. I think this is one of the coolest game ideas I have ever had, joining the ranks of the recursive circle-hex maze games, and the particle man adventure games.