Plughole Manual

8th August 2002

Name

plughole - a real-time arcarde game.

Synopsis

plughole [ -s | -s num ]

Description

Plughole is based on the arcade game ``Block Hole'' in which the player has to complete coloured shapes by firing a matter gun. The players ship initially starts on the left edge of the screen and slowly moves towards the right hand egde of the screen. If the player touches any matter on the screen, or reaches the right hand edge, the game is over. To finish the current level, the player must remove the shape built of colons `:' situated on the far right hand edge. Once this is achieved the screen is cleared, a new jumble of matter is placed on the screen and the player is returned to the left edge of the screen.

The player may fire upto four pieces of matter at any one instance, the matter floats serenely across the screen until it touches other matter, and then assumes the colour of the piece of matter it touched, scoring five points. However if at any time a rectangular border of one or more colours is completed, where no colour used in the border protudes outside the rectangle, the rectangle and its contents are slowly removed from the screen. The points awarded is twenty times the area of the rectangle.

The controls are;

q
to move up.
a
to move down.
spc
to fire some matter.
S
to commit suicide.

On-Screen Info

The bottom line shows the current score and level.

Flags

The -s num flag gives the top num (default 18) high scores.

Environment

The users name for the high score file is taken from the first set environment variable from the following list; NAME, LOGNAME, USER. If none of these are set, the login name is used.

Author

The program plughole was written by The Chief Slime Monster, (mauls@uk.ac.warwick.cs) and Harvey ``Max'' Thompson (harveyt@sco.COM).

Acknowledgements

Thanx to the following people for one/many of graphix ideas, hoopy C routines, criticism, free drinks and motivation!

Io, FloYd, Mirk, Midas, and a discrete number of others.

Feedback to <mike@miketaylor.org.uk> is welcome!