blockrage - a falling-blocks arcade game
blockrage
blockrage [options]
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.
- 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
- 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
(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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The HOME variable is used for ~ substitution in the RC file.
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...
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)
This manpage describes Block Rage version 0.2.2
The Block Rage homepage at <http://blockrage.sourceforge.net>. Additional
documentation is also available in the source distribution.