x4war - An X11 version of Chinese four-state war game. WHAT IS IT? This is a board game which implements the Chinese four-state war game in the X Window environment. It allows four players to play the game on four displays, each coordinating a complete army, players at the opposite position of the playing board are allied. The goal of the game is to capture the COLOURS of the enemy. I heard it's sort of like the American game 'stratego'. COMPILING The program is implemented using Xlib and Xt. It should be compilable in most of X11/R4 environment. Presently the program is tested only under SunOS 4.1.1 and IRIX 4.0.1 System V. There are two sets of bitmaps which can be used for the faces of pieces, one is in Chiese characters under subdirectory ./bitmaps/chinese_piece, the other is drawings under subdirectory ./bitmaps/image_piece. When you compile, you can select one of the bitmaps set. 1) select a set of bitmaps If you want to use the Chinese character bitmaps, nothing needs to be changed. If you want to use the image bitmaps, edit Makefile.simple to define DEFS to empty, or comment out DEFINES definition in Imakefile if you use Imakefile. 2) compilation. If you use Makefile.simple, the steps are as follows: %make -f Makefile.simple bgbitmap to get 'bgbitmap' for creating the background of the board. %bgbitmap wait for a second and a background bitmap file called 'war_background.xbm' will be created in the bitmaps subdirectory. %make -f Makefile.simple this will get you the 'x4war' executable. If you use Imakefile, you can type 'xmkmf' to get a Makefile, then use the above commands for Makefile.simple with '-f Makefile.simple' omitted. The file 'x4war' is enough for the game. Other files can be removed after you get the 'x4war' file. USAGE Type 'x4war -usage' to get command options. For the meaning of the pieces and rules of the game, please consult one who can read Chinese characters and knows the conventional rules. Also read x4war.man for detail. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special thanks to Zhongmin Guo, Bo Wang, Ju Wu, and Danpo Zhang, who created most of the bitmaps and had given many valuable suggestions. And many thanks to my fellow students at School of Computing Science and Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University, who had helped to test the program and given all kinds of support. I'm also grateful to those who, after the first release of the program, communicated with me via e-mail and gave me suggestions about the program. Especially to Reece Peacock (nrp@btcase.bt.co.uk), who provided most of the bitmaps in ./bitmaps/image_piece, and kindly granted me the permission to distribute them to the public. COPYRIGHT Copyright 1992 by Xiaobing Chen Permission to use, copy, and distribute for non-commercial purposes, is hereby granted without fee, providing that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both the copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. The software may be modified for your own purposes, but modified versions may not be distributed without prior consent of the the author. This software is provided "as is" without any expressed or implied warranty. The author may be contacted via: Address: Xiaobing Chen School of Computing Science Simon Fraser University Burnaby, B.C., V5A 1S6 Canada EMail: xiaobing@cs.sfu.ca
