Squaroid

http://www.azzit.de/squaroid/
lukas@azzit.de


* The Game Basics
=================
( for the Game Rules see further below )

The client connects to hostname:port you have entered after startup,
and immediately /JOINs channel #squaroid.
You can /join other channels, and /part ANY channel (even #squaroid).
But as soon as the last channel for one connection is left, the
connection to the relevant server is closed.
You may of course establish more than one connection to different
servers, and you can play/observe as many games at once as your brain
can manage ;-)

Every player you might challenge has two icons left to his name in the
names list on the right.

To challenge a player click on the square (left symbol).
If your opponent accepted, the board will pop-up, and the players
start putting (click) stones on the 8x8 field board.

A bot handles scores. To access scores,
you may enter "/score <nickname>" to get the scores for one player,
or "/allscores" to get the scores of all players.
Also, "/msg" and "/notice" handle private message as provided by
IRC. Now you may log out by saying "/exit", "/quit" or "/part" in the
chatroom.
All these "/"-commands are not supported by the in-game chat.

PLUGINS
=======
The Plugins are not installed anywhere, you have to copy them by hand
to where you want it.
To Load plugins specify -P <pathto/plugin.so> on the squaroid command 
line when starting...

* The Commands
==============
  /exit, /quit, /part
	 All these do the same: disconnect from server, reopen connect
	 dialog

  /disconnect
	disconnects from server, does _not_ reopen connect dialog

  /solo
	start a solo game, i.e. start playing yourself

  /msg, /notice
	these commands send private messages to another player
	Usage: /msg <nickname> <message>

  /me
  perform an action on the channel (this is the same as in any irc client)

  /save
	tell the bot to save your rating in the database, this also gives
	you a playerid which identifies you to the bot (the nickname does
	not matter, as it can be "stolen" and so it's not unique)
	the playerid is is 32characters long md5 string, which is
	automatically saved in the configuration file (either on exit, if
	SaveOnExit is enabled, or you explicitly tell squaroid to).

  /restore
  tell the bot to restore your scores from the database. you can only
	restore a session once, and if you restored a session, it's
	automatically saved if you leave or quit!
	


* The Rules
===========

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the following is quoted from http://members.aol.com/cubist/MySquares.html
which is also a great resource for rules and strategies!
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In MetaSquares, you earn points by making squares -- that is, you put
your stones down on the board so that you've got one stone at each
corner of a square. The value of a square is determined by its size,
from the minimum of 4 points up to the maximum of 64. If you've got
three corners of a square, and your opponent grabs the last corner
before you can take it, nobody gets the points for that square. How do
you determine the value of a square? Glad you asked...

The value of any given square is actually determined by the size of
its "bounding box", the smallest orthogonally-aligned square that your
square can fit into. The graphic (see the URL above) immediately above
shows a variety of squares, plus their associated bounding boxes. For
each square, the black circles are the stones that make up that
square; the blue lines are the square itself; and the red lines are
the bounding box for that square. In addition, I've explicitly marked
out the size (both width and height, since it is a square) of each
square's bounding box. For purposes of scoring, the size of the
bounding box is the number of cell-rows across it is. Take the square
of that number (width), and that is the value of your square. 

*** for more info: check out http://members.aol.com/cubist/MySquares.html

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