MazeWarDoc.tioga
Spreitzer, May 12, 1985 4:15:51 pm PDT
MazeWar
CEDAR 6.0 — FOR INTERNAL XEROX USE ONLY
MazeWar
Mike Spreitzer
© Copyright 1985 Xerox Corporation. All rights reserved.
Abstract: MazeWar is a Cedar implementation of the popular net game.
Created by: Mike Spreitzer
Maintained by: Mike Spreitzer <Spreitzer.pa>
Keywords: MazeWar, Game
XEROX   Xerox Corporation
    Palo Alto Research Center
    3333 Coyote Hill Road
    Palo Alto, California 94304

For Internal Xerox Use Only
1. Introduction
MazeWar is distributed multi-person seek-and-destroy game. You've all seen it before. This package is an implementation in Cedar. It does not communicate with any other implementations (e.g. the Alto one, the XDE one, the LISP one, &etc.).
2. Keystrokes
Here are the keystrokes defined in the standard TIP table (sweep the mouse through the maze to grab its attention):
Move Forward: D or Keyset3
Move Backward: G or Keyset5 or Space
Turn Left: S or Keyset2
Turn Right: F or Keyset4
Turn Around: A or Keyset1
Shoot: K or Middle Mouse Button
Peek Left: J or Left Mouse Button
Peek Right: L or Right Mouse Button
Flip Autopilot switch: Control Return
3. Commands
Running MazeWar.BCD causes four commands to be registered with the Commander:
MazeWar
Starts playing maze war. Each instance of MazeWarImpl can be only one player; this command will refuse to create more. This command can take arguments:
Name: Token ← <user name>"@"<machine name>
Pics: Token ← "<installation directory>Eyeball"
This tells MazeWar what images to use for you in the maze. Pics should be the prefix of four REMOTE file names (the default is the only one that may be local) giving the appearance of the front, the back, and the left and right profiles. The four file names are derived from the prefix by appending "Front.AIS", "Back.AIS", "Left.AIS", and "Right.AIS". Preceeding the prefix with a dash causes the image to be video-inverted. "<installation directory>" refers to the directory MazeWar.DF was BroughtOver into; it MUST be ///Commands/.
TIPTable: Token ← "<installation directory>MazeWar.TIP"
This names the TIP table used by the game. Don't mess with it unless you know what you're doing.
MazeSource: Token ← "<installation directory>MazeWar.Maze"
This names the file containing the maze you wish to play in. There may be several games concurrently running independently in different mazes. All players in the same maze (different files may contain the same maze) play together.
reread: Boolean ← FALSE
This forces the TIP table file to be read, even if its name hasn't changed. If images have been previously read from the file named by Pics, they will not be reread iff reread is FALSE.
All arguments have defaults, which will be applied if the argument is not specified. The arguments may be specified positionally (in the order given above) or by keyword. Examples:
MazeWar FastFinger /MAXC/Spreitzer/Cannon
MazeWar TIPTable = /Ivy/JoeBloe/MyMazeWar.TIP
Before resorting to the defaults, however, one more thing is tried (except for reread): the user profile. The names looked for in the profile are the names given above, with "MazeWar." prepended. An example user profile line:
MazeWar.TIPTable: /Ivy/JoeBloe/MyMazeWar.TIP
MazeWarStop
This command removes you from the game. It is synonymous with destroying the MazeWar viewer.
MazeWarContact
MazeWar uses Grapevine to find players in the game. Grapevine is sometimes very slow; it can take many minutes to find all the players using Grapevine. The MazeWarContact command provides a way around this; it lets you find a given player. You must know the net address and "player id" of the player you want to contact (this can be found out by having that player do a WhoAmI command). You then say something like:
MazeWarContact "3#256#1" -17701
WhoAmI
This command gives your net address and player id; it only works if you are actually playing.
4. Multiple Players Per Machine
You can have more than one player on a machine. To do this, run MazeWar.BCD a second time (you need to give the -a switch to the Run command to do this). The second time MazeWar.BCD is run, the commands are registered with the names "MazeWar2", "MazeWarStop2", and so on; the third time, they are suffixed with "3", and so on.
5. Installation
MazeWar must be installed by BringingOver the public part of MazeWar.DF into ///Commands/. Then, from any working directory, the commands described above can be invoked.