This game used to have a different name, but somebody warned me that I might have been violating some copyright rules, therefor the change to Line Up!.
Line Up! (Vier op een Rij) is a board game for two players. I started developing this on a Sun Workstation without any user-interface, because a collegue of me had made a version of this game in Prolog and I thought I could do this better in C. This version played pretty good, allthough it couldn't beat my friend Mark, the local Vier op een Rij guru. By tuning the algorithm, I came to a program that could do up to 800000 evaluations per minute, which I myself found impressing. Somewhat later, I started porting the game to my home Macintosh. I finished this at the end of may 92, which resulted in version 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 (the last containing some bug fixes).
I then put it aside for some time, up to the point where I felt like developing some more. I was working on other program, but since I had some problems there (I found out that it already existed), I decided to go back to Line Up!. I had some ideas fo what could be improved, and what would be nice, and implemented most of it. The most interesting is certainly the possibility to play against somebody on another computer over the AppleTalk network. I first wanted to name this version 1.1, but the enhancements and new features are so major, that I decided to make it a 2.0 immediately. So far for the story behind all this.
THE GAME
The rules of the game are simple. In turn both players may drop one stone in the box. The one who gets 4 stones of his color connected in a vertical, diagonal or horizontal row, wins the game. A draw is possible, when the box is filled completely and no player connected four stones.
THE OPPONENT
In this version of LIne Up!, you can play against the Macintosh, let the computer play itself, play against somebody else on the same computer or play against somebody on another Macintosh (for the last case both Macintoshes must be connected to the same AppleTalk network). If you're playing against the Macintosh, the playing strength can be set, by specifying the numbers of moves to look ahead, or by specifying an amount of time for finding a move. Of course finding a move will take longer when the computer plays 'better' (and the other way around).
THE FEATURES
If you are not running System 7, there are not many features. You can play a game (not over the network) and that is basically it. But after all, this is not meant for old systems (the only reason it runs is because somebody was complaining, and I wanted to be a nice guy).
If you use System 7 however, the game has a great number of possibilities:
- You can save games and reload them later on.
- You can print out the board.
- You can get a hint for your next move.
- You can see what the last move was.
- You can modify the colors or in case you're running in B/W the patterns.
- You can specify a number of preferences.
- You can save your preferences so that they will be loaded automatically on startup.
- You can select the computers playing strength.
- There are nice sounds.
- There is good music (if you know where to find it).
- There is animation.
- When playing over the network, you can communicate with your opponent via a
message window.
- There is balloon help.
- You can use either the mouse or the keyboard to play.
- The game works in the background in all cases.
THE COMPATIBILITY
Line Up! should run on all kinds of Macintoshes. When I say that it should run on all Macs, understand that I do not guarantee this, and that I will take no responsibility if it crashes and you lose work (you should have saved it before anyway). However, I have been testing on a number of machines, and have not discovered problems (in version 1 there was a crash when you had more then 256 colors, but this is fixed).
THE SHAREWARE FEE
Line Up! is Shareware, if you like it (and have not payed before), send $10 to:
Berrie Kremers
Prof. Cobbenhagenlaan 464
5037 DJ Tilburg
The Netherlands
I want to thank the generous people who already payed, for keeping me motivated and flattering my ego.
THE PROBLEMS AND SUGGESTIONS
Problems, bugs, suggestions, recommendations, errors in my English etc. can be sent to the same address. I can also be reached through e-mail, the address is: berrie@kub.nl.
THE EXPLANATION
Line Up! is very easy to play. The only part where you might need some explanation is on how to start a game against somebody on another Macintosh.
I will start with the first item. To make playing over the network possible, I have used program linking and the AppleEvent mechanism. This means that some conditions must be met:
- Program Linking must be turned on on the machine of your opponent-to-come (this
can be done in the Sharing Setup control panel).
- You must have a login on the other machine which allows you link to programs
(such a login can be created in the Users & Groups control panel).
- Program Linking must be turned on for Line Up! on the other the other machine
(this can be done using the Sharing... button in the File menu of the Finder).
- Line Up! must be running on the other machine (but not nessecary in the
foreground).
- The opponent-to-come must have specified in his Line Up! preferences that he
allows other to place requests for games.
This means of course in the other way around that to let others start a game against you, you must fulfil these conditions on your machine. This might seem a lot, but once all is set correctly, it is easy to use. You might find it a problem that Line Up! has to run on the other machine, but the program linking mechanism does not allow to start applications on other machines (and I agree with this strategy, you don't want others to fool around on your system).
To play against somebody else, you select Network Game... from the File menu. You will then get a standard dialogbox in which you see all the machines in your network. For the selected machine, all the programs you can link to will be shown. In this case the only program you can link to is Line Up!. If you find one, you can select it, and after having logged in to the other machine, the person on that machine will be asked if he wants to play a game against you. If he has Line Up! in the background, the Line Up! icon will start flashing in the Program Menu. He has one minute to respond to your request, after that the request is timed out. (Thus, if you are willing to play a game, you can first look for somebody to play against, and if you don't find anybody, you can leave Line Up! open and do something else, allowing others to place requests to play against you).
When the connection is made, you can play. The person placing the request starts the game. Besides the Game window you will see a Message window. Whatever you type when this window is active will appear in your upper text box of this window, and in the lower text box of the opponents Message window. Characters can be added to and removed from the end only. This gives you simple, yet sufficient, communication.
So far, I know of 2 'problems'. First, if a machine goes down (without quitting Line Up! nicely), the other side does not know this, but off course you will find it strange if your opponent hasn't done a move the last two hours. Second, if two persons try to start a game against each other at the same time. Both will be waiting for each other one minute, to get the message that the request was timed out. Just retry.
THE PREFERENCES
When you select the Preferences... button from the Game menu, you will get the Preferences Dialog. At the top will find three buttons (in case you are running in color or grayscale) or two option menus (in case you are running in black and white). I suppose this requires no further explanation. Below this there are 7 checkbuttons.
- Sound. If checked, there will be sounds when your opponent moves and when some-
body wins the game.
- Drop Animation. If checked, the stone will fall down in the box to it's position. If
not checked, it is placed directly at the right position.
- Confirm Abort. The style guidelines say that you have to ask the user for a confir-
mation when he closes a changed document. For a simple document as presented
here however, this can be pretty annoying. Thus, if not checked, you do not have to
confirm.
- Show Column Indicator. If checked, there will be a small line at the bottom of the
game window with the letters A to G identifying the columns. Easy if you use the
keyboard to do moves.
- About Dialog At Startup. If checked, Line Up! will start up with the About
dialog. This is checked by default, so that you will see my name at least once, but
I understand that this gets boring, so uncheck it.
- Players Dialog For New Game. If checked, you will be asked to specify the players
for the game. If not checked, a game will start directly, using the previous speci-
fication of players.
- Allow Game Requests. If you don't want to see any game requests while you are
playing, you could turn of Program Linking for Line Up!. But suppose you are
currently playing over the network, then this is not a very good idea. In that case,
just uncheck this one, and all requests for you will be denied automatically (but
