Brainwave is Bolo cyborg that improves your Bolo abilities. Here's a list of its features.
Tank Controls
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- Auto-Mapping
- Continuous local display and full-map display
- Topographical
- Map shows terrain gradations, pillbox locations, and bases
- Tactical
- Map shows pillboxes, bases, nearby tanks, and nearby builders
- Radar
- Auto-Aiming (Aligns tank to either the center or corner of a nearby object)
- Stagger Mines
- Clear Mines
Builder Controls
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- Automatic and manual road, bridge, and boat building (Determines nearby danger)
- Automatic tree gathering (Determines nearby danger)
- Can restrict speed when Builder is outside of tank
- Can display time till new builder lands.
Miscellaneous
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- Can transmit location to allies (upon request)
- Can transmit current Brainwave version to all players
- User Definable keys
- Saves keys and menu selections in the Bolo Prefs file.
*** This version may not work a Quadra 840av ***
Requirements
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Bolo 0.99.1+
020 processor or better
32-bit Quickdraw (Will work in B&W, however maps are almost unreadable)
64k available after Bolo is launched
WARNING
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This cyborg is not meant is a crutch for new players. You should be able to play Bolo just fine without this brain.
Setup
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Drop Brainwave into the Bolo "Brains" folder. Launch Bolo and enable Brainwave, under the "Tank Controls" menu.
* If the auto-mapping functions are disabled, increase the memory allocation by about 100k. Or reduce the Monitors setting to 16 colors.
Automatic Functions
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Brainwave can control builder functions: harvest trees, build roads, bridges, and boats automatically. Brainwave will only send out the builder if not in danger. The danger must also be gone for 2 seconds. Pressing the 'Forget Danger' key will ignore any danger and send the builder no matter what's out there --- You may lose your builder.
If your tank is hidden, the builder will only gather trees from behind it. This reduces the chance of your location being revealed.
If your tank is visible, the builder will only take trees adjacent to your tank, excluding trees within 45° of your current gun position.
Brainwave will automatically build roads and bridges if you are approaching or on craters, rubble, swamp, water. Brainwave will save 1 tree (2 trees if building roads) for emergency purposes.
The 'Efficient Bridges' option will try to conserve trees. It will build a bridge when it HAS too, as opposed to building nearly every square. This option is great if you are limited to resources. With this option checked, Brainwave can go about 27 to 29 squares over water without sinking (assuming a full speed and load of trees). Without, it can go between 19-26 squares without sinking.
Brainwave can automatically build a boat if you are completely surrounded by water.
* Lag may mess up the bridge building procedure (because Bolo won't called Brainwave during that period) and you may lose a few shells and/or it might build a boat.
You can also deploy the builder to build a boat on a body of water that's in the direction of your tank's current facing. For instance if you are approaching water (i.e. 5 squares away) the builder will be sent ahead of your tank to build the boat. Just continue in your present direction. The builder can also be deployed to build a road or bridge in the direction of the tank's facing.
Information Window
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The information window is the black box with the red lettering. It tells you information on your location, builder, and surrounding area. On the right side of the window is a local map (It can be either the Tactical map or the Topographical, as determined by the menu selection).
If your builder gets somehow gets killed (I advise against this ever happening), the far left side tells you the directions from your tank to your builders landing location. It will also approximate the time to landing, based upon the current game speed.
Mapping Functions
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As your tank moves across the terrain, Brainwave updates two maps, the Topographical and the Tactical. They can be displayed several ways:
1) Menu selection
2) By a keypress
3) Viewing the local area in the information window
Topographical Map
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The topographical map shows the terrain, your location, and any pills and/or bases.
All pillboxes appear red and all bases appear yellow, your tank appears white. No other objects appear on this map.
Tactical Map
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The Tactical map shows all enemy objects as red and all friendly objects as green. An object can be a tank, base, pillbox, builder. Water is also shown for reference.
If any pillbox is known to be 33% damaged or more, then it will flash on this map. The status of your pillboxes is known at all times.
If a base has changed alignment, it will also flash for a short period of time.
Hide Bases will not show any of the bases on the tactical map or in the radar (although they will still be updated)
* Pillboxes that have been picked up by the enemy are not removed from the map. They change color and stay in their original location until information to the contrary is revealed. When in doubt, check the main Bolo window. Bolo, as of version 0.99.2, does not pass any information about each pill (i.e. is it being carried by someone). Only the pills that are currently nearby or owned by you are known.
Radar
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The radar window will show objects that are visible to the tank. It is always 100% accurate. Otherwise it is the same as the Tactical map.
The 'Rotating Radar' option will rotate the objects such that the objects you are facing appear north. Similar to Spectre's radar.
Shapes on Tactical Map and Radar
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Base Tank Pillbox Builder
••• • •
• • ••• ••• •
••• • • •
Allies appear green
Enemies appear red
Neutral objects appear gray
Your tank and builder appears white
* Shapes of the tactical map may get temporarily distorted because the map is not constantly being redrawn.
Stagger Mining
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This function will not lay any mines if there is a mine adjacent to the tank. This prevents the chain reaction effect and makes fortifying your bases easier.
* This function can't work well around lag. Dropping mines from the tank is not accurate under laggish conditions. This may get fixed in future Bolo versions.
Clear Mines
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Holding down the key will clear mines. If "Clear All Mines" is selected then the tank will destroy all mines within range. Otherwise it will just destroy mines within 45° of the gun position.
* Brainwave cannot destroy any mines that have been placed on the map but still visible to the user via the "No hidden mines" option. Bolo does not tell Brains where these mines are even though they are visible on the screen, as of v0.99.2. They do however become visible when nearby.
Auto-Aimming
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Holding down the auto-aimming keys will align the tank to the object that your tank is "aimed" at. The information window tells you what you are currently aiming at and its distance. These functions will try to 'perfect' the aiming.
"Align Tank" will aim your tank to the center of the object
"Offset Tank" will aim your tank to the second farthest corner of the object (Useful when used in conjunction with some wall tricks)
'Align Tank' 'Offset Tank'
• • • • • ◊
• ◊ • • • •
• • • • • •
Δ Δ
The "Don't target allies" will ignore all allied objects when aiming the tank.
The "Don't target bases" will ignore all bases when aiming the tank.
* If you are aiming at a builder, Brainwave will also adjust the range.
Communication
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If Brainwave receives a "/who" command from any player, Brainwave will respond with its name and version number.
If Brainwave receives a "/where" or "/status" command from an ally, Brainwave will send your current location or other information. It will only send the information to your allies. The information sent can be modified, see below.
TroubleShooting
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Brainwave may be too slow to work on certain computers, causing play to be choppy. I've tried to speed things up, but graphics speed can be really slow. Here are a few things you can try in order to speed things up:
-) Turn off large maps and radar (if currently being displayed)
-) Quit background applications (if any)
-) Switch to 16 colors
-) Turn off the Info bar
-) Turn off Auto-Mapping
-) Turn off various builder functions
* If Auto-Mapping is your problem, it will be fixed when the map is mapped. To 'ease the lag', you could turn off Auto-Mapping and flip it on at different spots on the map. (mosaic mapping, perhaps?)
If Brainwave causes Bolo or Finder to crash, make sure your memory was sufficient. If it was then email me, be as specific as possible. As far as I know it is very stable.
* I don't know if Brainwave will work with System 6
Modifying Brainwave
-------------------
You can modify the format of the '/where' and '/status' lines to send to information you want. You need ResEdit to modify the STR# resources named "/where" or "/status".
The following text fragments will insert the appropriate information into the line.
'XXX'..............X location
'YYY'..............Y location
'NAME'..........Your current name
'DIR'..............Your current tank direction
'SPEED'........Current speed
'AMMO'.........Amount of shells
'ARMOR'.......Strength of armor
'TREES'........Amount of trees
'PILLS'.........Amount of pills carried
'BUILDER'....Current status of your builder
Other '/blah' commands:
'/ping'................Outputs 'Pong'
'/motto'............Outputs the text in the STR# resource named "/motto" This is intented
as fun.
* DO NOT distribute a modified version of Brainwave
Future Plans
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- Incorporating Pillbox views into map data
- Expand information transfer options
- Keep track of enemy builder's landing times/locations
- Hooks for allied helper brains to pass information and commands (i.e. "/protect me")
- Create helper brain (Would be a separate brain)
- Increase speed
- Warning sounds
- Any other ideas???
Versions
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1.0 - Released January 24, 1994.
1.1 - Released February 4, 1994.
- Key presses are now ignored when the message window is foremost.
- Window positions are now saved
- Keyboard functions can now be deactivated to avoid 'key confusion'
- Defaults can now be reset
- No Key, Swap and Restore buttons added to Set Keys window
Acknowledgements
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I would like to thank the following people for extensively beta-testing Brainwave:
David Clancy
Jonas Cooper
Joseph Goodman
Edward Gray
Chris Howard
David Josselyn
Gersham Meharg
Herb Petschauer
Cory L. Scott
Ned Watson
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Please respond with any comments or suggestions for future versions to:
Tom Gooding
tgooding@iastate.edu
Iowa State University
BTW - If you encounter a bug, please be somewhat descriptive. Most of this code has been tested under single player or AppleTalk modes against Indies. I have not had a lot of time to test it under lag conditions.
