BLOCKRAGE(6)BLOCKRAGE(6)NAMEblockrage - a falling-blocks arcade game
SYNOPSISblockrage
blockrage [options]
DESCRIPTION
Block Rage is a "falling-blocks" arcade game, inspired by a DOS clas‐
sic. 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 con‐
fig 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] exe‐
cutable 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 block‐
rage-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 win‐
dowed 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.svo‐
boda@seznam.cz>. (Please do not list this e-mail address on your web‐
page, or list it in other packages, before contacting me firts)
NOTES
This manpage describes Block Rage version 0.2.2
SEE ALSO
The Block Rage homepage at <http://blockrage.sourceforge.net>. Addi‐
tional documentation is also available in the source distribution.
Block Rage 10 September 2005 BLOCKRAGE(6)
