Spellcast is a strange little strategy game, which I found
on the Net and have implemented for X.
Basically, two or more players try to vaporize each other
with a wide assortment of wizardly spells. For the complete
rules, see the man page (spellcast.6), which goes into
exhaustive detail.
Compiling should be straightforward; spellcast uses only
Xlib, with no widget sets or other libraries.
NOTE: Some (all?) versions of SunOS have a buggy
realloc(), which causes spellcast to crash early and often.
If you're on a Sparc and you have this problem, the fix
is to compile with -lbsdmalloc. Uncomment the OTHERLIBS
line in the Makefile.
The Makefile begins with a few definitions which you
can change:
the directories where everything gets installed;
the default fonts that the program tries to load (usually
times 14, helvetica 12, and fixed, in that order);
the directory in which game transcripts are stored (usually
/tmp.)
Type "make" or "make spellcast" to create the executable.
"make stupid" will create a version of the game with a
terribly stupid, text-only interface -- this is not very
playable, and is really only good for testing. You enter
all the players' moves in a single string at the prompt,
and answer questions as they appear.
The file spelllist.ps is a PostScript document showing all
the available spells, in two columns: one sorted by gesture,
and one sorted by name. By default, it will be installed as
DESTDIR/lib/spellcast/spelllist.ps.
The original paper-and-pencil version of this game was
created by Richard Bartle. This implementation is by
Andrew Plotkin (ap1i+@andrew.cmu.edu). It is
copyright 1993 by Andrew Plotkin. The source code may
be freely copied, distributed, and modified, as long as
this copyright notice is retained.
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