_______________ | | Casey Schaphorst, Amiga Users of the Heartlands | H U S T L E | P.O. Box 1432 DTS, Omaha, NE 68101 |_______________| Wind Dragon Inn (14/614), 402-291-8053 (C) Copyright 1987, All Rights Reserved 0. Preliminaries Essentially this software is released freely according to that great spirit of public domain software ... to avoid exploitation the author reserves all rights, with the following waivers... Permission is granted to distribute copies of this software provided that source and documentation are distributed together. Organizations are allowed to distribute Hustle! on a strictly non-profit basis only ... a disk-fee to cover cost of materials is the only compensation any such organization may seek. No permission to modify the source code, credits, or documentation is granted. Organizations seeking to distribute this software in conjunction with a product of their own must obtain prior expressed permission from the author. ... and that's enough of that ... I. Revision History 1.00 Originally written in MS-Basic for the TRS-80 model I. 1.10 Bonus block feature added 2.00 Complete re-write was performed in order to bring the game over to the Amiga. 2.10 Worm movement redesigned to be driven by a circular queue which stores direction changes, rather than a queue of coordinates occupied by the worm. 3.00 Multiple timed events were added. Jackpot feature and jackpot advance blocks were added. 3.01 Mutant feature designed into the game, also "Special" Blocks. 3.10 Number of event timers reduced by categorizing timers in general groups, rather than using one timer per block. Block plotting algorithm redesigned to be less computation- ally expensive. Obstacle feature incorporated. 3.11 Special Block timer incorporated as a special mode of the Special Features Timer (SFT) to further reduce the number of timers polled each loop. Special Block requests are queued until the SFT is available. 3.12 Occasionally catastrophic block plotting error fixed, along with minor tweaks ... minor bug fixes implemented. Scoring feat- ures altered to increase the playability of the game. New high score storage format implemented (with provision for conversion from 3.11 to 3.12 format). Still no sound. 4.00 Not yet available ... conversion from AmigaBasic to C. II. Instructions A. Object Hustle is an arcade-style game presently written in AmigaBasic for the Amiga. It was inspired by a similar, though much cruder, version of the game which was demonstrated to me on a TRS-80 in 1981. After seeing the demonstration, I decided that I could have done a much better job and set out to create my own improved version of the game. In Hustle! you control a voracious 'worm' which scrambles about a predetermined playfield in search of 'food blocks'. Your worm scores (eats) a food block simply by making contact with it, i.e. running into it. Food blocks appear at intervals on the playfield, and remain fixed in position for a variable amount of time before they 'spoil' and wink out. There are a few types of food blocks: (1) Regular Most common type of food block. Hitting three of these successively awards Bonus Blocks. Hitting more than three successively is similarly very beneficial. (2) Bonus Bonus blocks appear after three *successive* regular blocks are scored. There are three kinds of Bonus Blocks: (1) Advance Multiplier, (2) Score Jackpot, and (3) Mutant. In Mutant Mode, you are virtually (!!) indestructable for a certain period of time. The Advance Multiplier Bonus Block can be used to advance the multiplier to 5x. After this, the Adv. Mult. Block awards the Jackpot and schedules the appearence of a Special Block. (3) Special Special blocks only appear at certain times. They invoke one of several possible features such as worm shrinking, elective mutant, super Jackpot award, Obstacle clearing, etc. An 'elective mutant' can be activated, once achieved, at any time by pressing the "-" key on the numeric keypad (for those of you who played before reading, this is probably the tidbit for which you were searching). When the multiplier reaches 5x, certain Spec- ial blocks, when hit, will advance the multiplier beyond 5x. (4) Adv Jackpot Up to 3 of these targets may be in the play- field at once. In general, the better you play, the more adv. targets you get. The first adv. Jackpot target appears when you achieve a bonus multiplier of 2. Scoring these targets awards no points, but increases the value of the Jackpot. (5) Obstacles Small "Jolly-Rogers" will appear on the screen. These skull-and-crossbones objects must be avoided at all times, since hitting one ends your game. A game may have up to ten of these Obstacles. Obstacles, like other targets, move after a variable period of time. Certain Special Blocks, when hit, will erase all the Obstacles from the playfield and award points for erasing displayed Obstacles. Scoring any type of food block will cause your worm to grow! Scoring Adv. Jackpot targets cause your worm to grow the least amount of all, while other food blocks induce a more vigorous growth. The game ends when your worm hits any type of object which isn't a food block, i.e. Obstacles, the walls of the playfield, or the worm's own trailing body (!!). In the beginning of the game, the worm's body is small and hardly an obstacle, but as food blocks are consumed the worm's own hulking corpus fast becomes the most formidable obstacle. Mutant mode causes the worm to be slightly less sensitive to head injury in a way which is left up to the player to figure out. B. Score/Status Window To the right of the playfield on the game screen is the Score/Status Window. The information in this window consists of. . . (1) Score The number of points (calories?) which you have accrued is displayed in the score box. (2) Block Value The block value indicates the base (unmodified) number of points that are awarded when a Regular block is scored. Failing to reach Regular Blocks before they spoil causes a penalty to be assess- ed against the Block Value. (3) Multiplier This indicates the factor by which the Block Value is multiplied when points are awarded for scoring a regular block. (4) Jackpot The current number of points (calories?) contained in the Jackpot is displayed next to this prompt. The Jackpot will never contain fewer than 1000 points. Failing to reach Jackpot Scoring blocks in time causes some of the nutitional value of the Jackpot to spoil (yeah, right...). (5) Length The number of millimeters in length that your worm spans is displayed here. At the beginning of the game, worms are 3mm. The maximum reason- able size for a worm in this game is about 1.5 to 2 meters (!!!). (6) Kinks The number of kinks (direction changes) in the body of the worm is displayed here. Each turn made by the head of the worm causes this number to grow. As the tail catches up to and turns around these kinks, this number shrinks. (7) % Occupancy The total 'area' represented by the playfield is 2250 square mm's. The number displayed here is the percentage of this area which is occ- upied by your worm. You will notice that when occupancy reaches even 10%, the size of the worm is problematic. C. Movement In its current inception, Hustle remains extremely easy to play ... all that one actually does during the game is control the movement of a voracious 'worm' which scrambles about its predetermined playfield in search of 'food blocks.' Movement is simple: one can only go up, down, left, or right. Movement changes are effected by pressing the following keys on the numeric keypad, or in the cursor arrow cluster: 8 (Up) Up Arrow | | (Left) 4 --+-- 6 (Right) Left-Arrow --+-- Right Arrow | | 2 (Down) Down Arrow Direction changes are processed, in general, as soon as the proper key is pressed. Since this game is in 'real-time' movement occurs continuously unless the game is purposely paused. A direction change causes a 'kink' to occur in the trailing body of the worm. This kink will remain until the tail of the worm catches up to the kinked area, and changes its direction around the kink. The number of kinks in your worm is displayed in the scoring/status window. Certain scoring features depend on the number of kinks in your worm. Because it is these kinks which are queued, there is a certain limit to the number of direction changes which can be pending at the same time ... skilled players may wish to reduce the value of QSize to see how well they do when they must be conservative about the number of course changes they make (please be aware that no permission is granted to distribute modified copies of the source code). D. Scoring Strategies Much of this is left to the player to discover. One should remember that scoring three *successive* Regular blocks invokes the appearence of a Bonus type of block (Advance Multiplier, Score Jackpot, Mutant). Missing a Regular food block after previously hitting one or two causes the block counter to be zeroed, and the worm must start all over again and hit the next three blocks in succession in order to achieve a Bonus block. A count of successive Regular food blocks that have been scored is kept in the Scoring/Status window. Never miss a Score Jackpot block! Your Jackpot can grow to enormous proportions! III. Caveats, etc. Hustle! v.3.11 is comparable in overall speed to v.1.10 which ran on the TRS-80 Model I ... "How can this be?!?", I hear you cry. 1.78 MHz on a 8/16 bit Z80 vs. 7.16 MHz on a 16/24 bit 68000 ... one would expect that the Amiga is faster. In fact, it is MUCH faster, but much of the added speed is sacrificed in supporting the extended features ... v.1.10 serviced only one timer. In addition, the simplicity of the TRS-80 allowed an advantage: its memory-mapped display area could be used to store the playfield ... do you see the beauty of this system? Each character on the screen represented a byte in the memory-mapped display memory. I didn't need to DIMension a separate array in memory, since I could simply use the display memory to contain the playfield information. In AmigaBasic, the workings of display are, as yet, wholly alien to me. As a result many of the operations that occur are duplicated, i.e. a block must be plotted on the screen, and also mapped into the DIMensioned playfield grid (Grid(x,y)). In v.3.11+, each screen event has a corres- ponding Grid(x,y) event which is redundant ... and this induces some overhead that is not present in the TRS-80 version. In addition, a pixel on the TRS-80 is about the same size as a block of 8x4 pixels on the Amiga screen. As a result, the 'pixel-size' corresponding to each location in Grid(x,y) is an 8x4 block of pixels. It is well that the Amiga has hardware graphics support, since the 32:1 plotting of pixels that occurs on the Amiga, in this case, is still very much faster than the TRS-80 (...naturally...). The mouse serves no purpose in this game, and can be a nuisance if left in the playfield. Furthermore, activating the MENU button will permanently erase the strip of screen in which the menu bar appears. It's best just to move the mouse pointer completely off the screen. For best results, the key repeat delay in the preferences for the disk on which you have Hustle! installed should be set to a rather long value. Because the Amiga's own console input device queues up key-presses, and because Hustle! only processes one key per movement round, absent-mindedly leaving a key pressed while moving will cause a large number of key-presses to be queued. This will result in a delay of several rounds before you will be able to change directions ... the consequences are likely to be fatal. As with all AmigaBasic programs, the start of the game will be very slow and jerky until AmigaBasic has the opportunity to learn the addresses of all the labels in the program ... this can't be avoided. This program pushes AmigaBasic to its limit, in terms of speed, in order to achieve an 'arcade-style' of smoothness. Multitasking many kinds of other programs with AmigaBasic will slow the game down significantly. Later in the game, as more features are activated, servicing of the various game 'timers' (more like counters) becomes more freq- uent. This will cause the game to drag somewhat, especially when several timed events are pending at the same time. The decrease in performance is noticable, but not intolerable. Re-writing this game into an object executable form will eliminate all of these problems. For those of you who are familiar with Amiga Hardware, esp. the display, you may have some ideas about how the efficiency of this game can be improved ... I would enjoy hearing them: Casey Schaphorst Wind Dragon Inn (Fido 14/614) Bellevue, NE 402-291-8053 (300/1200/2400 bps)