GNOME Robots II Documentation
Author: m.rae@inpharmatica.co.uk
Keywords: Robots, Robots 2, Gnobots, GnobotsII

# Gnome robotter II dokumentation

Ophavsret (C) tilhørende 1999, Mark Rae

This program and the documentation are 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; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

For yderligere detaljer se filen COPYING.

## 1. Introduktion

Gnome Robotter II er en udvikling af det originale Gnome Robot spil, som was itself based on the tekst baserede robot spil, som kan findes on a number of UNIX systems, and comes with the BSD games package on Linux systems.
This new version includes two types of robots, movable junkheaps, multiple game configurations, user definable keyboard layouts, sound using ESD if you have it, as well as all of the other features which were present in the original Gnome Robots game.

## 2. Spillet

When you start the game you will find yourself surrounded by a number of robots, or some other strange but equally hostile adversaries if you have chosen a scenario other than the default.
As you move about, the robots will move directly towards you with one goal in mind - killing you. As if that wasn't bad enough there are two types of robots, one of which can move twice as fast as you!
Luckily you have two ways to avoid this unfortunate outcome.

Firstly, the robots have not been blessed with a great deal of intelligence, and will be destroyed if they crash into each other, or any other debris which has been left around from previous collisions.
Secondly, if you do find yourself in a tight spot, you have the ability to teleport randomly to another spot on the screen.
And, if supported in the game configuration you have chosen, you can push the junkheaps around to form barricades to protect you. Also if you are daring enough you can Splat! the robots by pushing junkheaps on top of them for an additional bonus.

Unfortunately, randomly teleporting means that there is a chance that you might end up being right next to a robot so they can kill you when they make their move. All is not lost however, as you can have a number of safe teleports which will place you out of immediate danger. You can earn more free teleports as you go along, how you gain them depends on the chosen game, but typically you get one for each robot that is destroyed while you are 'waiting', up to a maximum of 10. If you don't want to waste your saved up safe teleports you can choose to randomly teleport if you think it's safe enough.

If you press the 'Wait' key (see below) you will no longer be able to move until either all of the robots, which still move towards you, are gone or you are killed. Doing this may earn you extra safe teleports as described above.

If you manage to reach the point where more than half of the screen is occupied by robots, the number of robots will be reset to the starting amount, allowing you to continue.

## 3. Keys

There are three sets of predefined keys for controlling your player -

### Standard

These are the standard keys that are normally used for playing all version of the robot games.

      Up Left: Y           Up: K              Up Right: U
         Left: H  Stand Still: . or Space        Right: L
    Down Left: B         Down: J            Down Right: N

             Teleport: T
    Randomly Teleport: R
                 Wait: W

### Set 1

These keys are laid out on the main part of the keyboard in star shaped pattern for people who don't like the HJKL layout.

      Up Left: Q           Up: W    Up Right: E
         Left: A  Stand Still: S       Right: D
    Down Left: Z         Down: X  Down Right: C

             Teleport: T
    Randomly Teleport: R
                 Wait: Return

### Set 2 - Numeric Keypad

You may need to switch on the NumLock to make these work

      Up Left: 7           Up: 8    Up Right: 9
         Left: 4  Stand Still: 5       Right: 6
    Down Left: 1         Down: 2  Down Right: 3

             Teleport: +
    Randomly Teleport: -
                 Wait: Enter

### Definér dine egne

Of course if you don't like any of the above keyboard layouts you can define your own. Select the box for the required movement and the press the key you want, the text representation of that key should then appear in the box.

## 4. Præferencer

The properties dialog allows you modify the behaviour and appearance of the game. There are three pages to the dialog:-

### Konfiguration

This page allows you to choose the type of game you want to play. The drop-down box at the top of the page allows you to choos from a number of predefined games, and the list-box below it shows the settings for that game.
The safe moves option will help you to avoid being killed due to a mistake. If you try to make a move that would lead to your death when there is a safe move available you will not be allowed to procceed. But be warned if there was no safe move available, other than teleporting, the move will be allowed to proceed.
There is also a ``super safe mode''. If you select this, you get beeped when there is no safe move and your only option is to teleport out.
If you select the sound check-box the game will play sounds for various events throughout the game. If you do not have ESD installed the game will beep using the computer speaker only on invalid moves.
The 'Splats' checkbox selects whether you want and sound played and a small 'Splat!' to appear on the screen.

### Grafik

This page allows you to select the graphics used throughout the game from the list in the dropdown-box. You will get a preview of the graphics below it.

### Tastatus

This screen allows you to define your own keyboard controls as described if the Keys section.

## 5. Diverse

You can design your own graphics for the game if you want. The graphics files are found in
$PREFIX/share/pixmaps/gnobots2, where $PREFIX depends on where Gnome was installed, usually either '/usr' or '/usr/local'
Each character is 16x16 pixels and there are 14 of them arranged in a PNG file which is 224x16 pixels in size. You can look at the existing files to see the order in which they must be arranged to produce the correct animated sequences.
Any graphics files which are placed in the directory are auto-detected so you don't need to alter any configuration files.

You can also define your own game configurations by creating extra '.cfg' files which are stored in the $PREFIX/share/gnobots2 directory.

If you have any suggestions or discover any BUGS you can e-mail the author at m.rae@inpharmatica.co.uk