What is Linux Snipes?  A single-player text-mode action game in which
the object is to kill a number of evil smiley face characters (the
"snipes") and the hives which create them.  Of course, the snipes try
to kill you at the same time.

How do you play?  The gray arrow keys move your player around in the
maze.  The keys a, s, d, and w fire in various directions.  You can
move and fire diagonally using combinations of vertical and horizontal
keys.  You can also move and fire at the same time.  Levels are
specified by a single letter and a single digit.  The letter
determines certain properties such as whether it is safe to touch the
walls, whether snipes can turn into ghosts when shot, and whether
diagonal shots bounce.  The digit specifies a degree of difficulty
with 1 being the lowest and 9 the highest.

What platforms are supported?  The game was originally written for
the Linux console.  An X window version has been added recently.
It should be fairly easy to change the program to run on other
Unix consoles.

How do I run in an Xterm?  Be warned, you can't press multiple
keys at once in a Xterm, but it is probably faster than using the
native X support at the moment.  Anyway, if you want to run snipes
this way, you can use a script such as the following:

    #!/bin/sh
    exec xterm-color -font vga -tn xterm-color -e snipes

What is the glorious ancestry of Linux Snipes?  Novell NetWare 2.x
came with a pair of "network testing utility" programs (games) called
(if I remember correctly) nsnipes and ncsnipes.  I assume that the N
was for "networked" and the C for "color": In my memory, you used
ncsnipes if you had a color display.  I played these as a freshman
and sophomore in high school.  At some point, I ran across a
single player (non-networked) version called hsnipes which I could
play on my computer.  It had a few quirks including the fact that it
required you to type "mode mono" before running it on a color display
and was extremely difficult to quit (Ctrl-C many many times and it
would finally notice).  For some reason, I felt like I should
reimplement it and made an abortive attempt sometime in high school.
In college, I started running Linux.  I could still run hsnipes
(under DOSemu) but game play was less satisfactory.  It became
clear that a Linux version was necessary, so I resumed my efforts,
working in spurts as motivation came.

What will be the future of Linux Snipes?  My intent is first to
make it a near-perfect replica of hsnipes and then to add network
support so that it can also function nearly identically to n[c]snipes.
Now that it runs under X, it is not Linux specific so I need to
pick a new name.  Suggestions are welcome.

See the 'TODO' file for a description of features that remain
to be implemented, as well as a list of known bugs.

While running this program, you will be unable to switch VTs.
Pressing CTRL-Z will suspend the raw keyboard mode (re-enabling
VT switching) until you press Enter.  Use the grey arrow keys
to move.  You can move diagonally by pressing a combination
of one vertical movement key with one horizontal movement key
simultaneously.  CTRL-C is quit.  Jenny scrolling is named after
a friend who suggested it.  While it makes the screen less
flickery, it's a little hard to deal with IMHO.

Linux Snipes Home Page: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~boultonj/snipes.html


NOTE:

  This program is not guaranteed to be 100% bug free.  Sorry,
  but that's life.  The fact that it uses raw keyboard mode
  makes bugs somewhat more problematic than they would be
  otherwise.  This section describes how to minimize problems.

  If the program crashes, the keyboard may be left in raw mode.
  In that case, the console will be unusable: you will not be
  able to switch VTs and when you type, garbage will probably
  appear on the screen.  Recent versions of the program try to
  prevent this from happening but you can be extra safe by
  running it like so:

    snipes; kbd_mode -a; stty sane; reset

  After snipes runs, even if it terminates by crashing, the
  subsequent three commands will run.  Note that the last two
  restore some screen settings which may also be incorrect.

  If the program hangs for some reason, it's harder to get
  things fixed.  If you're on a network, you can always log
  in remotely and kill the snipes processes ("killall snipes"
  should do.)  There are other things you can do without
  having to log in remotely, however.  One is to set up gpm
  (the text-mode mouse control program which lets you copy
  and paste text on the console) to be able to execute commands
  for you when you use certain combinations of mouse clicks.
  The command I use in my startup scripts looks like:

    gpm -t $MOUSETYPE \
      -S '/usr/bin/killall -9 snipes;/usr/bin/kbd_mode -a::'

  See the man page for gpm for more information on how this works.
  In short, it lets you kill snipes and restore the keyboard
  using a special sequence of mouse button clicks.  If you use
  this method, you will want to make sure you use whatever
  path is appropriate on your system for the killall and
  kbd_mode programs.

  Finally, recent versions of the Linux kernel have support for
  some "magic" SysRq key commands.  If you have compiled your
  kernel with this enabled, pressing Alt-SysRq-R will change the
  keyboard translation mode back to "cooked".