Nexus 1.2.1, by Alex MacAulay (macaulay@ecr.mu.oz.au)
Introduction:
This is a bug-fix version of Nexus 1.2. Nexus is a Bolo cyborg which improves your performance. It should be compatible with at least Bolo 0.99.1 and higher. It has the following features (new ones are marked with a *):
• Extra key controls to control some building actions;
• Automated road building;
• Automatic harvesting of forest;
• Automatic random mine dropping;
• * Mine clearing key - clears mines in an area in front of you;
• * Automatic mapping with a map window which shows terrain you have been over;
• Navigational information about tanks, pillboxes and bases;
• Wide area radar showing a larger view of the area around you;
• Radar views for pillboxes;
• Sends version information to any player who asks;
• * Saves key settings and window positions in the Bolo Preferences file.
Controls:
The extra controls which Nexus gives you are:
• Build road/harvest forest under tank;
• Build wall/build boat/repair pillbox/harvest forest before tank;
• No auto-building which prevents builder automatically building, harvesting, dropping mines, etc.
The plant pillbox key is mainly intended for times when you are just about to die and need to quickly save a pillbox. The pillbox is mostly placed on the side of your tank which has the smallest number of hostile objects. This, of course, is quite a dangerous operation and I cannot guarantee that your builder will not die trying to do this.
Automatic actions:
The automatic features can all be turned off temporarily by holding down the "No auto-building" key. You can also turn them on and off individually using the menu.
Auto Build Roads: If you are in water, swamp, rubble or crater your builder will build a road under you if the following conditions are satisfied:
• you will have enough trees left to build a pillbox;
• there are no enemy pills/tanks nearby;
• there are no shells in the air;
• you are travelling slower than 3/4 max speed.
Auto Harvest Forest: When you are travelling through forest and everything looks safe and you don't have a tank full of trees, the builder will automatically be sent out to harvest forest. To ensure that the builder will not get left behind, auto-harvesting only occurs if your tank is fairly close to the centre of the square that is to be harvested.
Auto Random Mine: If you have any mines and there is nothing hostile nearby, you might drop a mine. Mostly, mines are dropped in a diagonal pattern and not next to bases.
Navigation Window:
When you click on one of the status icons of a tank/pillbox/base in the Bolo window, the Navigation window will display the distance and direction from your tank to the (last known) position of the object. For pillboxes it also displays the last known strength and for tanks gives the name of the owner. To show/hide the Navigation window, you can use the menu or option-click on the window to hide it.
Note: The strength of your pillboxes is known at all times but strengths of neutral and enemy pillboxes are updated only when you see them.
Note: Currently, Bolo gives brains info about the positions of all bases at the beginning of the game so you get this info too!!!
Radar window:
The radar window shows the positions of tanks, pillboxes, bases and shells relative to your tank. Among other things, this allows you to watch for enemies sneaking up behind you while attacking a pillbox. The symbols are:
• cross - tank;
• filled square - pillbox;
• open square - base;
• diagonal cross - man;
• dot - shell.
The symbols are also colour-coded with blue identifying neutral objects, green for friendly objects and red for enemy objects. To show/hide the radar window, you can use the menu or option-click on the window to hide it.
Pillbox radar:
To get a pillbox radar view, hold the option key down and click on the pillbox icon for the pillbox you want to view. A small window will appear which contains the radar view seen from that pillbox as well as navigation information and the strength of the pillbox. This information is updated approximately every two seconds. If the pillbox is dead or not owned by you, the view will be crossed out, but the navigation and strength info will still be shown (although they may not be current). To close a pillbox view, just option-click on it.
[ I should emphasise here that this quite powerful feature uses ONLY the standard Bolo brain interface to get this information, so using this feature is not cheating (although it can give you a big advantage over people who aren't using it). This feature is implemented by switching very quickly between the pillbox views every few seconds. Fortunately, the view in the Bolo window does not actually show any of this happening and you don't even notice it (apart from a slight delay in response) on reasonably fast computers. ]
Mapping:
If you have Colour Quickdraw and enough memory allocated to Bolo, Nexus will draw a map of the terrain that you see. This is drawn to the screen every 8 seconds. Your tank is shown as a cross. Also, when you click on a tank/pill/base in the Bolo window, a small square drawn around it on the map as well as the info in the Navigation window.
Automatic Messaging:
If you are sent the message "/who" by any player, Nexus will automatically reply with a short message describing the name and version of itself.
Known problems:
• Nexus/Bolo may crash if you do not give it enough memory - the standard amount is sufficient, but it would be unwise to decrease it too much.
• Nexus is too slow to work effectively on Classics and similar machines.
• Still interprets key-presses when you are in other applications (but not when the Message window is showing).
• When using the arrow keys to scroll the view around the tank and with some pillbox radar views showing, sometimes the main Bolo view will switch to being centred around you (just like pressing the tank view key) or another pillbox - also other strange things happen to the main Bolo view... Problems also occur when switching between pillbox views when you have radar views...
• If you open Nexus from the Finder, then Bolo will do some drawing to the desktop rather than it's own window (only once).
Version history:
1.0 First release. [10/8/93]
1.1 Major improvements and the odd bug fixed (and probably lots more added). Colour-coded radar; radar window for pillboxes; auto-harvesting; auto-random mining. [22/8/93]
1.2 Added automatic colour mapping (requires colour QD); added mine clearing in an area; can now choose which key turns off auto-building; increased "danger distance" for automatic building even further away from enemy pills/tanks; key settings dialog doesn't come up anymore when starting - you can access this from the "Nexus" menu; saves key settings and window locs in the Bolo Preferences file; fixed nasty bug which caused unpredictable crashes when using pillbox views - thanks to Jim Baughman for describing this bug. [9/9/93]
1.2.1 Fixed a bug that caused a crash when you tried using the Navigation window without having the Map window available. [18/9/93]
I hope you enjoy using Nexus. Please send comments, bugs, ideas, etc. to me at macaulay@ecr.mu.oz.au.
