Nort is basically a lightcycles game for two people. Therefore what you do is ride a little motorbike (not a car), which leaves little trails, around a little arena, while your opponent does the same thing. The bikes are controlled by pressing the appropriate key to move in the desired direction. The trick to the game is that you cannot ride into the trails that you or your opponent have left. In addition, you can define a number of obstacles which will be randomly placed in the arena, which you also cannot ride into (however, you can ride on top of them, but this is rather pointless).
Randomly placed around the arena in each round are four things which can be picked up. These pickups are either red, green, or missles. The red pickups will affect the red player when used, and the green pickups will affect the green player. The missle blows a hole in the trail directly in front of the player that uses it. When the 'use pickup' key is pressed, the last thing that was picked up will be used.
pickup letters:
W: builds a purple wall in front of corresponding colour (walls cannot be destroyed by
missles)
F: makes corresponding colour go faster for the rest of the round
J: makes corresponding colour jump:- the beam will turn yellow (both players can ride
through yellow trails), and the player will not be able to steer
Options
On the title screen, click on the thing that you want to change. The keys can be altered by clicking on them and then typing the wanted key, and these new keys will be saved when you quit, whether you want them saved or not. The general speed slide bar will change the speed of the slow, medium and fast settings. Setting the volume to zero will make the game run smoother and faster on slower machines.
Clicking on the nort orb allows you to change the pictures used in the game. Once a picture has been changed you cannot retrieve the previous picture. Not all pictures are suitable for use in nort. This is because nort checks collisions by colours. Therefore using pictures that contain the same colours as the trails, the walls or the boundaries of the obstacles will cause problems, unless of course strange effects are wanted (On the point of strange effects, each of the players' initial positions will never be on something coloured the same colour as the boundary colours, but may be on something coloured with a different colour). Also on the point of changing the pictures, if the PICT you have selected is not displayed in the picture changing screen, the computers memory has probably stuffed up. You can still play the game, but it is better if you quit and reload the program. Changing too many pictures at once or selecting a stupendously large PICT file will probably cause problems. Also you should check beforehand that you have enough disk space so nort can save the picture.
To use your own music in nort, it must be in 'MADF' form. These files can be created or converted to from MOD, STrk and others file types with 'Player Pro' by Antoine Rosset. Adding a 'MADF' file to the music list is achieved by clicking on the word 'Music' on the title screen, selecting the desired cell and then clicking on 'Change'. A file selection box will then appear. After selecting the file, click on done. To cycle through the music list, click on the name of the current music file. Once nort is using a music file, the file must either remain in the same directory that it was in when you added it to the music list, or the same directory as nort. Therefore, if you want to give someone a copy of nort with your music in it, just add it to the music list and then make sure they put the music file in the same directory as nort. If nort cannot find a music file, it will remove it from the list.
Registration
The registration fee is $5 Australian, but if you do not have any Australian currency you can send as close as you can get to the equivalent amount in cash (please cash, as cheques are costly to process, and so probably not worth it for five dollars).
My Address is:
James Reid
12 Monaco Crescent
Grange S.A. 5022
AUSTRALIA
and hopefully, my e-mail address is:
jmreid@teaching.cs.adelaide.edu.au
feel free to write, with any questions, comments or just to tell me how terrible my music is, etc.
