ztrack - simple curses-based pseudo-3D driving game
ztrack
Ztrack is a simple curses-based pseudo-3D driving game. It's loosely based on an
old LCD game, I think it was Casio's "Turbo Drive", that I used to
spend far too long playing. As such, the graphics are fairly simplistic, but
what do you expect from a curses-based driving game!?
You have to get as far as you can down an infinitely long three-track road
populated with stupid, but dangerous, computer-controlled cars. You score most
for doing it at your top speed of 150 MPH, but you can do it more slowly if
you enjoy doing pointless boring things.
Cars can't crash into you from behind, but you can crash into them from behind,
and you can also crash by moving into a lane already occupied. Though you
can't directly see cars level with you (that thing down the bottom is your
bonnet/hood in case you hadn't figured it out), the things which happen to
look like square brackets are in fact the edges of your wing mirrors, and a
blob appears in these when a car is level with you in the relevant lane.
You get three lives/cars, so when you've crashed three times it's game over.
Rather than holding a button to accelerate etc. which is clearly rather
impractical, you instead set an acceleration mode. This can be any of 'accel',
'decel', or 'const'. The latter is basically a perfect cruise control. Q sets
accel mode, A sets decel mode, and Space or Tab set const mode. O moves left a
lane, P moves right a lane.
Ztrack needs at least an 80x24 screen. It doesn't bother aborting if the screen
is smaller, and doesn't use any more if the screen is bigger.
There's no sensation of speed apart from the cars. This is a bit tricky to do
much about.
The computer car logic is virtually non-existent. It gets sufficiently fast that
this isn't too much of a problem, I think. :-)
Computer cars don't crash into each other, and even move through each other.
You can be really dull and not floor it if you want. I can't think of a
reasonable way to fix this. Possibly remove const mode?
There should probably be a persistent high-score table based on average speed,
then as a tie-breaker, on distance travelled.
There aren't any police cars, but I can't remember what they actually did
anyway. :-(
The high score is only for the current 'session' - quit the program, and bang
goes the high score. This reflects how meaningful the score is. :-)
Russell Marks
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