Free games lineofsight software for linux

Games::Irrlicht is a Perl module that use the Irrlicht 3D Engine in Perl.

SYNOPSIS

package MyGame;
use strict;

use base Games::Irrlicht;

use Games::Irrlicht::Constants; get EDT_SOFTWARE etc

# override methods:

The Why

When building a game or screensaver displaying some continously running animation, a couple of basics need to be done to get a smooth animation and to care of copying with varying speeds of the system. Ideally, the animation displayed should be always the same, no matter how fast the system is.

This not only includes different systems (a PS/2 for instance would be slower than a 3 Ghz PC system), but also changes in the speed of the system over time, for instance when a background process uses some CPU time or the complexity of the scene changes.

In many old (especial DOS) games, like the famous Wing Commander series, the animation would be drawn simple as fast as the system could, meaning that if you would try to play such a game on a modern machine it we end before you had the chance to click a button, simple because it wizzes a couple 10,000 frames per second past your screen.

While it is quite simple to restrict the maximum framerate possible, care must be taken to not just "burn" surplus CPU cycles. Instead the application should free the CPU whenever possible and give other applications/thread a chance to run. This is especially important for low-priority applications like screensavers.

Games::Irrlicht makes this possible for you without you needing to worry about how this is done. It will restrict the frame rate to a possible maximum and tries to achive the average framerate as close as possible to this maximum.

Games::Irrlicht also monitors the average framerate and gives you access to this value, so that you can, for instance, adjust the scene complexity based on the current framerate. You can access the current framerate, averaged over the last second (1000 ms) by calling current_fps.

Frame-rate Independend Clock

Now that our application is drawing frames (via the method draw_frame, which you should override in a subclass), we need a method to decouple the animation speed from the framerate.
If we would simple put put an animation step every frame, we would get some sort of Death of the Fast Machine" effect ala Wing Commander. E.g. if the system manages only 10 FPS, the animation would be slower than when we do 60 FPS.

To achive this, SDL::App::FPS features a clock, which runs independed of the current frame rate (and actually, independend of the systems clock, but more on this in the next section).
You can access it via a call to current_time, and it will return the ticks e.g. the number of milliseconds elapsed since the start of the application.

To effectively decouple animation speed from FPS, get at each frame the current time, then move all objects (or animation sequences) according to their speed and display them at the location that matches the time at the start of the frame. See examples/ for an example on how to do this.

Note that it is better to draw all objects according to the time at the start of the frame, and not according to the time when you draw a particular object. Or in other words, treat the time like it is standing still when drawing a complete frame. Thus each frame becomes a snapshot in time, and you dont get nasty sideeffects like one object beeing always "behind" the others just because it gets drawn earlier.

Time Warp

Now that we have a constant animation speed independend from framerate or system speed, lets have some fun.

Since all our animation steps are coupled to the current time, we can play tricks with the current time.

The function time_warp lets you access a time warp factor. The default is 1.0, but you can set it to any value you like. If you set it, for instance to 0.5, the time will pass only half as fast as it used to be. This means instant slow motion! And when you really based all your animation on the current time, as you should, then it will really slow down your entire game to a crawl.

Likewise a time warp of 2 lets the time pass twice as fast. There are virtually no restrictions to the time warp.

For instance, a time warp greater than one lets the player pass boring moments in a game, for instance when you need to wait for certain events in a strategy game, like your factory beeing completed.

Try to press the left (fast forward), right (slow motion) and middle (normal) mousebuttons in the example application and watch the effect.

If you are very bored, press the b key and see that even negative time warps are possible...

Ramping Time Warp

Now, setting the time war to factor of N is nice, but sometimes you want to make dramatic effects, like slowly freezing the time into ultra slow motion or speeding it up again.

For this, ramp_time_warp can be used. You give it a time warp factor you want to reach, and a time (based on real time, not the warped, but you can of course change this). Over the course of the time you specified, the time warp factor will be adapted until it reaches the new value. This means it is possible to slowly speeding up or down.

You can also check whether the time warp is constant or currently ramping by using time_is_ramping. When a ramp is in effect, call ramp_time_warp without arguments to get the current parameters. See below for details.

The example application uses the ramping effect instead instant time warp.

Event handlers

This section describes events as external events that typically happen due to user intervention.
Such events are keypresses, mouse movement, mouse button presses, or just the flipping of the power switch. Of course the last event cannot be handled in a sane way by our framework.

All the events are checked and handled by Games::Irrlicht automatically. The event QUIT (which denotes that the application should shut down) is also carried out automatically. If you want to do some tidying up when this happens, override the method quit_handler.

The event checking and handling is done at the start of each frame. This means no event will happen while you draw the current frame. Well, it will happen, but the action caused by that event will delayed until the next frame starts. This simplifies the frame drawing routine tremendously, since you know that your world will be static until the next frame.

Games Knoppix is a Knoppix based LiveCD with games.
The following games are included:
- Marble Blast Gold Demo (OpenGL)
- Mutant Storm Demo (OpenGL)
- Space Tripper Demo (OpenGL)
- Think Tanks Demo (OpenGL)
- Ufo AI (XMas Special) (OpenGL)
- Asciijump
- Atanks
- Bzflag (OpenGL)
- Bzflag-Server
- Crack-Attack (OpenGL)
- Crimson
- Crossfire-Client-GTK
- Crossfire-Client-X11
- Cube
- Empire
- Enigma
- Foobillard (OpenGL)
- Freeciv-Client
- Freeciv-Client-GTK
- Freeciv-Server
- Freesci
- Gltron (OpenGL)
- Gnuchess
- Gnugo
- JumpnBump
- Kbattleship
- Kmahjongg
- Kobodeluxe
- Ksokoban
- Lbreakout2
- Lgeneral
- Nethack-Console
- Nethack-Gnome
- Nethack-Lisp
- Nethack-Qt
- Nethack-X11
- Netpanzer (OpenGL)
- Neverball (OpenGL)
- Pysol
- Scorched3d (OpenGL)
- Tower Toppler
- Battle for Wesnoth
- Battle for Wesnoth Editor
- Battle for Wesnoth Server
- Xarchon
- Xblast
- Xblast-TNT
- Xboing
- Xgalaga
- Xskat
- Xsoldier

Games::Dice is a Perl module that can be used to simulate dice rolls.

SYNOPSIS

use Games::Dice roll;
$strength = roll 3d6+1;

use Games::Dice roll_array;
@rolls = roll_array 4d8;

Games::Dice simulates die rolls. It uses a function-oriented (not object-oriented) interface. No functions are exported by default. At present, there are two functions which are exportable: roll and roll_array. The latter is used internally by roll, but can also be exported by itself.

The number and type of dice to roll is given in a style which should be familiar to players of popular role-playing games: adb[+-*/b]c. a is optional and defaults to 1; it gives the number of dice to roll. b indicates the number of sides to each die; the most common, cube-shaped die is thus a d6. % can be used instead of 100 for b; hence, rolling 2d% and 2d100 is equivalent. roll simulates a rolls of b-sided dice and adds together the results.

The optional end, consisting of one of +-*/b and a number c, can modify the sum of the individual dice. +-*/ are similar in that they take the sum of the rolls and add or subtract c, or multiply or divide the sum by c. (x can also be used instead of *.) Hence, 1d6+2 gives a number in the range 3..8, and 2d4*10 gives a number in the range 20..80. (Using / truncates the result to an int after dividing.) Using b in this slot is a little different: its short for "best" and indicates "roll a number of dice, but add together only the best few". For example, 5d6b3 rolls five six- sided dice and adds together the three best rolls. This is sometimes used, for example, in roll-playing to give higher averages.

Generally, roll probably provides the nicer interface, since it does the adding up itself. However, in some situations one may wish to process the individual rolls (for example, I am told that in the game Feng Shui, the number of dice to be rolled cannot be determined in advance but depends on whether any 6s were rolled); in such a case, one can use roll_array to return an array of values, which can then be examined or processed in an application-dependent manner.

This having been said, comments and additions (especially if accompanied by code!) to Games::Dice are welcome. So, using the above example, if anyone wishes to contribute a function along the lines of roll_feng_shui to become part of Games::Dice (or to support any other style of die rolling), you can contribute it to the authors address, listed below.

Games::Bingo::Card is a helper class for Games::Bingo.

SYNOPSIS

use Games::Bingo::Card;

my $b = Games::Bingo-E new(90);
my $card = Games::Bingo::Card-E new($b);

my $bingo = Games::Bingo-E new(90);
$card-E validate($bingo);

use Games::Bingo::Print::Card;

my $p = Games::Bingo::Print::Card-E new();
$p-E populate();

The Games::Bingo::Card class suits the simple purpose of being able to generate bingo cards and validating whether they are valid in during a game where a player indicate victory.

It is also used by Games::Bingo::Print to hold the generated bingo cards before they are printed.

Games::Euchre is an Euchre card game for humans and computers.

SYNOPSIS

Simply run my game wrapper:

% euchre.pl

or write your own:

use Games::Euchre;
use Games::Euchre::AI::Simple;
use Games::Euchre::AI::Human;

my $game = Games::Euchre->new();
foreach my $i (1..3) {
$game->setAI($i, Games::Euchre::AI::Simple->new());
}
$game->setAI(4, Games::Euchre::AI::Human->new());
$game->playGame();
my @scores = sort {$b $a} $game->getScores();
print("The winner is " . $game->getWinner()->getName() . " with a score of " .
"$scores[0] to $scores[1]n");

This software implements the card game of Euchre. The game is played with four players composing two teams. Any of the four players can be human or computer players, but more than one human is not well supported yet.

The Games::Euchre::AI module implements a simple framework for adding new classes of human interfaces or computer opponents. I recomment that AI writers use Games::Euchre::AI::Simple (a REALLY dumb computer opponent) as starting point.
Aside from the ::AI class and its descendents, this package also implements the following classes: Games::Euchre::Team, Games::Euchre::Player and Games::Euchre::Trick.

Games::Othello is a Perl extension for modelling a game of Othello.

SYNOPSIS

use Games::Othello;

my $game = Games::Othello->new();

while( !game->over ) {
printf "It is presently %ss move",
($game->whos_move eq b) ? black, white;
my @possible_moves = values $game->possible_moves();

if ( ! @possible_moves ) {
print "You have no moves available, you must pass.
$game->pass_to_opponent;
} else {
foreach ( my $move ) @possible_moves ) {
printf
"You will take %d of your opponents chips if you place your chip on %d,%d",
scalar @{ $move->{chips} }, $move->{x}, $move->{y};
}
my ($locx, $locy) = get_move();
my $flipped = $game->place_chip( $locx, $locy );
}

my $layout = $game->chip_layout();
foreach my $row ( @$layout ) {
foreach my $pos ( @$row ) {
printf %3s,
($pos eq b) ? B # Black occupied square.
: ($pos eq w) ? W # White occupied square.
: # Un-occupied square.
}
print "nn";
}
}
my ($black_score, $white_score) = $game->score;