GNOME Robots Documentation

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 more details see the file COPYING.

1. Introduction

Gnome Robots is a version of the text based robots game which can be found on a number of UNIX systems, and comes with the BSD games package on Linux systems.
This version allows you to select a number of animated graphics scenarios, as well as providing a safe teleport feature so you are not totally at the mercy of your computer's random number generator.

2. Playing

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, using the keys listed below, the robots will move directly towards you with one goal in mind - killing 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.

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, getting 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.
You can switch the safe teleport option off to make the game behave like the classic robots.

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 will 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 keys for controlling your player -

Standard

These are the standard keys for playing robots, with the exception that 'Enter' is now the key to wait for the end of the game, as 'W' is now used by one of the other keyboard layouts.

  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: Enter

Main Keyboard

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: Enter

Numeric Keypad

These should work regardless of the Num Lock state

  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

In addition, the 'Space' key will start a new game if one is not already in progress.

4. Properties

The properties dialog allows you modify the behaviour and appearance of the game.

You can select which game graphics you want to use from those available in the drop-down list box.
This selection will remain in effect until the next time you start the game unless you select the 'make default' check-box.

If the game is in safe mode and you try to make a move which would cause you to be killed you are prevented from doing so. This only takes effect if there is another safe move which you could have made, otherwise you are allowed to proceed to your death.
If you don't select safe mode, then you don't get any protection at all.

If the save teleports option is selected then you can earn safe teleports as you play they game. These will allow you to teleport without the risk of appearing right next to a robot.

The sound option allows you to switch off the beep when you get killed or make a invalid move.

5. Misc

You can design your own graphics for the game if you want. The graphics files are found in
$PREFIX/share/pixmaps/gnobots, where $PREFIX depends on where Gnome was installed, usually either '/usr' or '/usr/local'
Each character is 16x16 pixels and there are 10 of them arranged in a PNG file which is 160x16 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.

If you have any suggestions or discover any BUGS you can e-mail the author at Mark.Rae@ed.ac.uk