NAME

blockrage - a falling-blocks arcade game

SYNOPSIS

blockrage

blockrage [options]

DESCRIPTION

Block Rage is a "falling-blocks" arcade game, inspired by a DOS classic. It features a two-player hotseat mode. In the future it should also feature nice graphics and sound.

GLOBAL KEYS

Alt-Enter: Toggle fullscreen mode
Alt-Backslash: Toggle doublesize mode
PrintScreen: Capture a screenshot to $HOME/blockrage-scr.pcx
P: Pause the game
Alt-X: Exit the program immediately

IN-GAME KEYS

P: Pause the game

Default key bindings for player 1:

Left Arrow: move block left
Right Arrow: move block right
Up Arrow: rotate block up
Down Arrow: rotate block down
Right Shift: drop block

Default key bindings for player 2:

A: move block left
D: move block right
W: rotate block up
S: rotate block down
Q: drop block

GAMEPLAY

(Assuming you didn't change the default key settings.) Use left/right arrows to move the falling piece left/right, up/down arrows to cycle it's tiles and right shift to make it fall faster.

Get three same pieces in a row (horizontal/vertical/diagonal) and boom! they dissappear and your score increases. You can earn even more points by inflicting chain reactions. A chain reaction happens when some pieces explode, the ones on top of them fall, and, forming a new line, explode again.

2-PLAYER HOTSEAT MODE

Default key settings for the other player are A,D (left,right) W,S (cycle), Q (drop).

If you inflict a chain reaction in hotseat mode, your opponent will get an unpleasant surprise in the form of a row of tiles inserted to the bottom of his playing board.

OPTIONS

You needn't really use them. Everything listed here can be set using the ingame menu.

-p <1|2>: sets the number of players
+d <4|5|6>: sets the difficulty Easy/Medium/Hard
+l <1..10>: sets the starting level
+b <0,1,...>: chooses a block set (piece graphics)

+k1 <left> <right> <sh_up> <sh_down> <drop>

+k2 <left> <right> <sh_up> <sh_down> <drop>: sets player 1/2 controls you must enter five decimal numbers corresponding to SDLK_* keycodes e.g. +k1 276 275 303 273 274
+data <dataset>: chooses a dataset. the format is identical to the format of blockrage.cfg. example: +data br320

THE RC FILES

Typically you don't need to know anything about the game's RC and config files. They are designed so it just magically works... But if you are interested: the RC and config files can be of great use if you want to install on a multiuser system (you can customize default settings for the users, create a shared topten table, etc).

When you start Block Rage, it tries to find in order:

1. <EXECDIR>/blockrage.rc: here <EXECDIR> is the directory where the blockrage[.exe] executable is situated.

2. $HOME/.blockrage/blockrage.rc

3. /etc/games/blockrage/blockrage.rc

Whichever is found first is processed. That is typically (1) if the game is run from the source directory, or (3) if the game is run from the UNIX FHS filesystem. Also any user can override the system-wide settings by creating the file (2).

The .rc file contains 5 lines:

<sys-config-file>: pathname of the system-wide config file
<user-config-file>: pathname of the user's config file
<data-dir>/: directory where the data files reside, trailed with slash
<topten-file>: pathname of the file where topscores are stored
<dataset>: name of the dataset to use (a data/ subdir)

In the source package's src/ directory the file blockrage.rc enables the game to be run directly from the src/ directory. The file blockrage-fhs.rc is the RC file for running from the live filesystem. 'make install' copies this file to /etc/games/blockrage/blockrage.rc. (3)

After processing the .rc file, the config files are processed.

THE CONFIG FILES

First the game tries to read the <user-config-file>. If it doesn't exist (meaning this user is running the game for the first time), if falls back to <sys-config-file>. If that cannot be found either, defaults are assumed.

The config file contains the key bindings, starting level, tileset, etc.

ENVIRONMENT

The HOME variable is used for ~ substitution in the RC file.

BUGS

Might not work properly on big endian machines such as Solaris. The directcolor screenshot writing is a mess. Stuck ALT key when toggling fullscreen or doublesize in Windows. Switching from fullscreen to windowed mode fails on Windows. Audio skew is BIG on windows. And more...

AUTHOR

Block Rage has been written in 1999-2005 by Jiri Svoboda <jirik.svoboda@seznam.cz>. (Please do not list this e-mail address on your webpage, or list it in other packages, before contacting me firts)

NOTES

This manpage describes Block Rage version 0.2.2