More DosGames 2.0/MORE - Dosgames 2.0 (Software Company)(1994).iso/dosgames/minerva/minerva.man

Text File | 1994-09-01 | 16KB | 361 lines

MINERVA(6)                 Minerva 1.0e Manual                   MINERVA(6)


* NAME
     minerva - Miinantallauspeli 1.0 Minefield Stomping Game

     The ancient Roman goddess of wisdom and the arts, identified
     with the Greek goddess Athena.
                     Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary

* SYNOPSIS
     minerva [ -smledhiGMSL3fqo ]

    -s    small  minefield 10x10 (default)
    -m    medium minefield 15x15
    -l    large  minefield 34x23

    -e    easy       18% mines (default)
    -d    difficult  23% mines
    -h    hard       28% mines
    -i    impossible 33% mines

    -G    Grass field (default)
    -M    Metal field
    -S    Sea field

    -3    3D minefield numbers (default)
    -L    left-handed mouse (swap buttons) (default right-handed)
    -q    Quiet

    -f    do not create any Files
    -o    do not reset mouse sensitivity (old mouse)

* DESCRIPTION

This is the best ever mines game. Really! It's a DOS program, needs 286
processor, standard VGA with 256k video RAM and about 200k free memory.
Mouse is recommended to see the cursor, otherwise you get the invisible
virtual cursor. There are too many features to describe, latest add-ons
are a color editor, "Hazards" menu items and a partial keyboard support
for menus! Besides it looks great. Next version out at Christmas. Maybe.

This is a postcardware product ie. please send me a postcard, if you
like it. And remember, if I don't hear from users out there, there's no
point making updates, not to mention letting you to know about them.

* STORY

You are a United Nations civil servant, who has been sent to Bosnia
after the war. Your mission is to help to clear the countryside of
countless forgotten land mines. Since the UN has unfortunately a severe
budget deficit all You were given was a pair of old boots and
instructions to "do it in the old-fashioned way". So You plug Your
fingers into Your ears, close eyes and bravely step forward. If You find
a mine, You'll get the minimum pension, otherwise You can still walk. So
good luck, keep walking and before starting wait till I get far enough..

NOTE: The object of the game is to step into all safe squares, you do
not have to mark mines.

* MOUSE CLICKING

Game is played with mouse (or keyboard) by moving mouse cursor on some
square on minefield and then pressing left or right mouse button. With
right-handed mouse the step button is left mouse button and the mark
button is the right mouse button. Pressing and releasing a mouse button
is called clicking. Clicking a step button is called stepping and
clicking mark button is called marking.

When you step on an unopened square (see "Icons" in Help menu) and there
is a mine, game ends (you die). If there's not a mine, square will be
revealed and if there's no mines in the 8 neighbouring squares, those
will be revealed etc. recursively. If in one or more neighbouring square
there are mines, a number will be written on the revealed square telling
how many mines there are close by. The color of the number will also
identify the value and help you to play faster.

When you mark an unopened square, the square will be marked and you can
no more step on it. If you mark a marked square, the mark is removed
(one flag option) or another mark is placed on it (2 flag option). You
can step on the second flag, it's there just to remind you this square
might be an unsafe place. If you mark a square with the second flag, the
square will get unmarked.

* SUPERCLICK

You can do a SuperClick by stepping on an already opened square. If
SuperClick is set to "None", nothing will happen (it was your choice).

However if SuperClick is "Step only", things get interesting: if the
value on stepped square equals the amount of nearby unopened squares,
all those squares will be stepped on. Otherwise you'll hear a nasty
LooseBeep sound effect and can watch how all nearby squares go down and
up. The "Step only" choice was created for all ex-MS Minesweeper users
to make Minerva feel more familiar.

SuperClick choice "Mark & Step" behaves just like "Step only", except
if the value on stepped square equals the amount of nearby opened
squares, all nearby unopened squares will be marked. Now you could solve
the whole field just by stepping around (stomping) with SuperClick, but
I have to warn you that it's not too fast. It's safe, but usually you'd
have to step into every square.

* KEYBOARD

There's some keyboard support, too. When I started this I was full-time
Macintosh user and really didn't know that one should be able to use
menus from keyboard.. Well, I'm working on it..

On minefield you can step with Return, Enter, Spacebar and Insert keys.
Marking happens with Delete, Plus, Minus, Star and Slash keys. The weird
marking keys come from keypad to enable playing with only one hand.

Cursor is moved with arrows keys, one square to direction of arrow,
except the cursor won't get outside of minefield. This is done by
pressing Shift down at the same time as arrow key. To the corners of the
minefield you can jump with Home (upper left), PageUp (upper right), End
(lower left) and PageDown (lower right), except with Shift it's the
whole screen, not minefield. The order of the last four keys can be
understood from the layout of usual keyboard (note Insert and Delete).

        Insert        Home        PageUp
        Delete        End        PageDown

                UpArrow
        LeftArrow    DownArrow    RightArrow

You can lock mouse step button down by pressing Control-LeftArrow and to
lock mark button press Control-RightArrow. They are released either by
repeating the lock procedure or by pressing and releasing the equivalent
mouse buttons, either with mouse or keyboard.

Pressing function key F1 will show some more keyboard short cuts.

* KEYBOARD AND MENUS

You can use menus with "Alt+Character Character" combinations, nothing
else is supported in this version. I also fixed UpArrow and DownArrow
movement in menus to occur in steps of menu item height, but if you go
down to menu items, you'll have to press Enter to select something.

Actually I didn't plan to release the keyboard menu support yet, but
thanx to buggy 1.0d and my backup system I really didn't have a choice.

* NEW GAME

When you start Minerva you will see a minefield with upper left corner
cleared as a safe starting place and a new game is automatically
started. A new game can also be started by selecting "New Game" in Game
menu (really:), pressing n or N key (while not in menu or dialog),
stepping on statusbar above menubar (in middle area) or, if there's a
blownup minefield, stepping on it. A new game is also started by
changing current size/level setting in one of the several available
ways.. Or selecting something under Hazards-menu. That should be all.

* CHANGING SETTINGS

Game settings such as minefield size (small, medium, large) and level
(easy, difficult, hard, impossible) can be selected from "Settings"
menu's submenus Level, Size, Exterior and Options. The last item will
present a dialog for less often used settings: number of flags (1/2),
cursor type (left/right-handed), menu (normal/autodrop), SuperClick
(none/step/mark & step), minefield values (3D/2D), sound (on/off).

Size can be changed by selecting from menu or by pressing appropriate
key s)mall m)edium l)arge (while not in menu or dialog. In HighScore
dialog will change the presented size/level board as by pressing
radiobuttons). Size can also be changed with mouse on statusbar area,
where current size is presented. Stepping will rotate forwards, marking
backwards. Difficulty level is equally, except it's statusbar level.

"Exteriors" offers 3 pre-defined field looks: Grass, Metal and Sea. If
you are not happy with these, there's a build-in color editor. I'm going
to switch to PCX images in nearby future, so there might be some more
depending how much memory they'll take (Ice).

All (almost) used settings are saved in a file minerva.def and restored
at the next startup. All settings can be overridden by command line
options (see above or type "minerva -?").

* END OF GAME

If you die, all squares will be revealed and the d*mned mine that blew
you up is highlighted, also all uncorrect marks will be crossed. If you
solved the field, but wasn't fast enough, field is yet again revealed.
If you made it and even fast enough, a dialog will popup telling you the
placement in Top 10 and requesting your name. The default name is Jouni
Miettunen (Yours Truly) or last typed name and you can accept it either
by pressing Return key or clicking step button. Now you get the High
Score dialog (see "Info" menu or press F7).

In High Score dialog your new entry is highlighted. If there were others
with same time, you will go past them. At the left side there are 2
radiobutton field with which you can check the other results (3 field
sizes * 4 difficulty levels == 12 high score boards). With the Reset
button you can reset all entries in the current board. All scores can be
reset from the Game menu. Score is saved in uncrypted minerva.hof file.
Pressing OK button or Return/Enter/ESC/Insert/spacebar key will exit
dialog (there are more :).

* COLOR EDITOR

This is the latest enchangement and not final, even though I've seen
worse ones. It works, but since I didn't have enough time to optimize
it, it's kind of slow to detect mouse clicking, not to mention the only
partionally functional sliders (thumb). Just press mouse button slowly.
And remember: when you erase "minerva.pal" file, you'll get the default
system colors! And believe me, you want them pretty soon :)

In this version you can select a color to edit, change it's RGB values
either by clicking on the black square right to slider and writing in a
new value, clicking arrow boxes (+/- 1), the scrollbar area (+/- 10) or
by grabbing the thumb and moving it, if you can find it. At the top are
samples of all icons, menus and buttons to show the effect of the new
color.

Default button will restore all colors as they were at startup, Cancel
button cancels all changes since entering the Color Editor and OK button
will keep the new colors and write them into minerva.pal file (a warning
example included!). Pressing Default button with mark button pressed
will scale all colors to gray:

    Gray Scale = (.30 * Red) + (.59 * Green) + (.11 * Blue)

Minerva.pal format is simple and you could write it with editor: each
line has 3 values (0-63) so that 1st is Red, 2nd is Green and 3rd Blue.
First line defined color 1, second line color 2 etc.. Order of colors is
the "normal" 16 computer colors: black, blue, green, cyan, red, magenta,
brown, lightgray, darkgray, lightblue, lightgreen, lightcyan, lightred,
lightmagenta, yellow, white.

* HINT

When you get into a tough spot, usually at the end,  you can ask for a
hint. Then Number_of_Squares/10 seconds is added to used time and for
same Number_of_Squares/10 seconds a safe square is being randomly
searched and after that one square at a time in order from the bottom
right corner one row at a time. There's a 100 millisecond delay between
cursor movement to show you that cursor _is_ moving and to make the cost
of asking help dear. However now you can actually solve those Impossible
fields. Finally :)

* PAUSE

Due to memory handling problems (allocating >64k memory) I desided to
restore the screen by redrawing it. Should work now.

* HAZARDS

So you think you've seen it all, that you can solve any minefield setup
with one hand tied and both eyes closed. Well think again, I added some
hazards to the game!

- rocks: Some meteorites have dropped on minefield. The good point is
that you can safely step on them, the bad point is that since they are
very magnetic the SuperClick doesn't work on them. Some SuperClick..

- detector: You have the very latest high-tech mine detector there's in
the world. That's what they told you.. The one you got operates only
occasionally, fortunately it still does give correct values.

- teleport: There must be some radioactive stuff around, since lately
you've been teleporting to random places every now and then.

- jumping mines: Unlike the real jumping mines, these don't wait you to
step on them and then jump up to blow your ... waterline away. These
wait for a while and if you don't come around they'll go looking for
you. Note: this could be extremely slow operation and so it's enabled
only if at least 5 safe squares are available.

NOTE: hazards aren't really finished yet, eg. how should they effect the
score? To keep record of each possible combination of hazard - level -
size would require too much space and time. Any ideas?

* HOW TO MAKE A NEW HIGH SCORE

You want to get a new high score, but don't want to reset old records..
Well, try this:

- turn Sound off, there's 18 millisecond delay in every Beep (sounds a
lot like cheating, maybe I should add delay in any case :)

- use SuperClick with both autostep and -mark, but avoid using automark.
Automarking seems IMHO only to slow down, since you usually can automark
only one square at a time and even then have to look for the one right
square to do that. Of course if you can automark several squares, do it.

- don't waste time marking squares. In this game the object is only to
locate all safe places and you DO NOT HAVE TO mark mines. However to use
autostep you still better mark some squares, but use Mark button.

- don't rush, look what you're doing and (try to) plan ahead.
- rest your arm on table etc. stable support
- using Rocks hazard might help
- be very very very lucky.

When I got lucky, I cleared small-easy field in 12 seconds, usual good
time is around 20-25 seconds. No Hazards were enabled.

* IN CASE OF TROUBLE

- Mouse: If you have trouble with the default mouse sensitivity settings
eg. the cursor rushes from one side to another with the slightest touch
to mouse, use command line option -o to get the default sensitivity.

- Files: If you have trouble with files eg. Minerva clains it can't
create any files, use command line option -f to prevent all writing on
disk. If you want those files, unlock the Minerva disk or get HD
diskette. I'll (try to) do a Critical Error Handler for next version,
now I'll just say: "taf lak" ("Tough luck" in Finglish :).

* WHY BETA? THIS IS THE BEST I'VE SEEN...

Well, you can't use menus with keyboard, that's why. Actually the menus
almost work now, I just have to rewrite everything related to menus and
redefine used structures.. also dialogs are without any kind of keyboard
support (except HighScore thanx to a couple dirty tricks).

And another thing: I don't use GUI library, I write it. Minerva is just
a guinea pig which helps me to develop and test it, so don't expect to
find all GUI features. If you miss something, let me know and I'll try
to add it (yes, I'm working on those menus :)

* TO DO

I should do a real manual.. and fix Color Editor. However the most
urgent thing is to reduce size of binary, now I got 14k free memory
when I run Minerva within compiler and I can't test any dialogs.

For more enchangements see history.log and mines.all. The latter file
includes some examples of features I might rip off and add into Minerva.
All suggestions most welcome. But since I do this for free and to learn
something (not sure what), no promises. See warranty for more.

* BUGS

There are a few known bugs, see history.log. However I'd like to
strongly press that none of those is fatal or causes any damage to
equipment what so ever. Well, as far as I know, see warranty for more.

* AVAILABILITY

ftp.funet.fi:/pb/msdos/games/puzzle/mines10e.zip
See minerva.txt for Official Distribution Policy.

* AUTHOR

This game is Postcardware. If you want to be notified about updates, get
your name into Credits dialog and tell me how it *really* should work,
please send an exotic picture postcard (don't forget email address) to:

Minerva 1.0e Beta
c/o Mr. Jouni Miettunen
Rautatienkatu 20 A 10
FIN-90100 OULU
FINLAND - EUROPE


Jouni Miettunen * [e-mail] * Oulu * Finland * Europe * 1993