aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer) (04/15/85)
As announced, the last part of the Hack 1.0.2 distribution has
been posted today. The stream of requests for parts ('I have parts
2, 5, 6 and 9 - can you please repost or mail the remaining pieces?')
has started already; my answer is still the same: NO. It is too
expensive to send the source many times across the atlantic.
I hope nobody will think it a good idea to repost the sources -
it is the best way to kill net.sources.games.
About the new version: although the similarity is striking, this
version is not compatible with previous versions and should have
a separate playground (default /usr/games/lib/hackdir). This
playgound should contain the following files:
data, help, hh, rumors: text files
hack the game itself
perm an empty file used for locking purposes
save a directory for saved games
record the list with topscorers
(possibly: news the latest hack news)
The default setup is to have hack setuid games:
-r-s--x--x 1 games 210944 Apr 14 19:45 hack
and to make hackdir and all files inside writable only to games.
You may wish to prevent players from reading and/or writing level
descriptions or saved files; it has become slightly less easy to
cheat by manipulating level descriptions or playing on two terminals,
but many kinds of cheating are still possible.
The record file now contains three more fields (so that you can't use
your old record file, or at least have to convert it): the date,
the userid and M/F for the player's sex (male is default - if one
hates to choke on his food one may put 'female' in the environment variable
HACKOPTIONS and choke on her food).
The previous default of maximal 6 entries per player name (one for each
character class) has now been changed into a default of maximal 6 entries
per userid, independent of the name chosen.
On some systems/terminals the help files help and hh will come out ugly
because of problems with tabs. In such a case, run them through expand
in order to remove the tabs. [Do *not* do this with data!]
As said before, the current version is probably much less stable than the
previous one; many features have been added on request of various users,
but these have never been tested. It may be wise to preserve the old
version until this new one has worked satisfactorily for some time.
I am happy with suggestions for improvement. (Give adjectives instead of
numbers for Hp(Hpmax), Str. / Define an input language <careful readers
of the source will have noticed several loose ends such as the command
#dip ; for not to frequently used commands I shall use words or even
sentences instead of one-letter abbreviations>. / Find quotations
describing monsters for use in the data file. / Change monsters and/or
monster behaviour. (Note that I prefer monsters that actually occur in
the mythology of some people; I would like to avoid monsters that were
invented for AD&D, if only for copyright reasons.)
I hope to get access to a SYSVR2 system soon, so that the next distribution
also will work on such systems. The next distribution (1.0.3) is scheduled
for this fall, but it may be that I'll be in Denmark around that time and
it is uncertain what computerfacilities I'll have available there.
Happy Hacking!