BattleView

August 18, 1992

What Is It?

BattleView was inspired by the x-windows game "Netrek".  I started out doing some simple animation to look into writting a NeXTStep version of "Netrek", and it evolved into this.  The basic idea is that you have Federation and Klingon ships shooting at one another.  Every time a ship gets hit (or it's commander feels like it), it changes direction.  If it takes enough hits, it explodes and is "re-born" somewhere else.  Every ship always fires at the nearest enemy.

How To Install?

Type "make install" (without the quotes) in a shell window.  You may want to look at Misc.h and play with some of values.  The default values are fine on a NextDimension system, and a little fast on a color slab.  If you have one of those systems without 'make' (and a compiler, etc.), just copy BattleView.BackO into wherever your BackSpace modules live.  Typically, this is either ~/Apps/BackSpace.app,  ~/Library/BackSpaceViews, or /LocalLibrary/BackSpaceViews.

This was written pretty quickly under 3.0PR2.  Like I said, I didn't start out to write a screen saver.  I am becoming attached to it, however, and may try to improve it for 3.0 final release.  So this may be a pre-release, or a final release.  Depends if anything else catches my attention (oh, say, like my job).

Improvements

There is a lot of room for improvement.  The phaser target select / draw / erase really belongs in Ship.[hm].  It's in BattleView for "historical" reasons.  I had wanted to put in other sub-classes of SpaceThing (asteroids, star bases, etc).  Even better would be to have each type of ship be a subclass of Ship.  Thus you would have FedCruser.[hm], KliCruser.[hm], FedScout.[hm], KliScout.[hm], each with different phaser damage, MAX_DAM, speed, and movement characteristics..  This wouldn't be hard either, just didn't get to it.  Intended to do real backing store, (didn't some losing company patent that?), but wimped out and just erase by putting black over the sections that need it.  If we had working backing store, we could put all this animation over a full screen picture of Jupiter, or what ever.  Oh well.  Maybe next release.

Copying and Distribution

This program and the files that make it up are under the terms of the GNU General Public License.  See the file COPYING for full information.  Basically, this means you can distribute it far and wide, just don't make money off of it.  If you hack it, fine, but give me credit for the original.  I would also appreciate hearing what you think of BattleSpace, and seeing any modifications you make (although this is not required).  I can be reached as dstrout@isi.edu.

Thanks

Lots of Thanks to Sam Streeper, without whom writing BackSpace modules would be pretty silly, since there would be no BackSpace.  Sam also provided some useful observations on earlier versions.

Thanks also to Terence Chang, Kevin Smith , Scott Silvey, and all the others who contributed to Netrek.  I wouldn't have thought of this if I han't been thinking of Netrek.