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NAME

       matanza - space war multiuser ascii game

SYNOPSIS

       matanza [OPTIONS]

DESCRIPTION

       Matanza  is  a  multiplayer  game.  In it, every player controls a ship
       cruising  in  space,  aiming  to  destroy  the  other   players   (and,
       eventually, ships controled by the computer). You connect to the server
       using a telnet client.

OPTIONS

       The first thing you must do is connect to the server.
              You must connect to the TCP port ‘7993’ (unless you specified  a
              different  port when you ran the server) of the host running the
              server.

       I won’t tell you how to do this, Luke.

       Umm.

       Don’t look at me like that!

       Ok, you win.
              It’s probably ’telnet localhost 7993’.

       Once connected, you’ll see some  nice  (c’mon  give  us  some  credits)
       introduction.

       You must hit <RET> (that’s <Enter>) to go to the game’s main screen.

       At the main screen, you must enter your name.
              That’s right, it can’t have more than 8 letters.  Oh, and it can
              not begin with a number.  Enter your name and hit  <RET>  a  few
              times.

       If  you  are  in  Windows’ stupid telnet client, the widgets there will
       look awful.   No  colors  or  anything.   We  are  going  to  fix  that
       eventually,  but...   well,  you’ll have to learn to live with that for
       the moment.  I’m sure you can, Luke.  After all,  you  could  stand  it
       when that stupid kid at school used to beat you, remember?

       But back to our game, you’ll see a ship in the middle of screen.
              Yes,  I said ship.  Okay, I know it looks more like fire effects
              than a ship, but with a couple of practice it’s  going  to  look
              better.  You just need to train your self to recognize it.

       Or  you could think of it as a big moth and of the bullets as moth-spit
       and the goal of this game would be to cover your enemies in your  spit.

       Now, that thing in the middle of the screen is YOUR ship.
              To control it you can use the following keys:

       `handlMake  the  ship rotate.  If you are wondering why I used ‘h’ and
              ‘l’, get a life (in other words,  learn  to  use  Vi).   It’s  a
              matter  of style.  Actually, I got so many complaints from lukes
              like you that I added support for arrow keys.

       `+and-’
              These allow you to zoom in and out.

       `jandkAccelerate the ship.  Yes,  it  can  move!   Yes,  at  different
              speeds!   Okay,  ‘j’  may not work (see --brake and --fly-back).
              More on that latter.  Again, arrows key works as well.

       ‘ ’ (thats space, dude)
              Shot.  Yay!  Bullets!  Or (depending  on  your  point  of  view)
              Moth-Spit!   Sorry,  dude,  the  telnet protocol doesn’t support
              sound so there’s no BZZZING when you shot.

       `bShot bullets backwards.  Sometimes this doesn’t work.   More  on
              that in section 6.

       `m’    Do you see two little imperfections on your ship’s wings?  Those
              are the MISSILES.  Yoy can shot them withm.  They  do  a  lot
              more  damage  than  the  bullets,  but  you have only two, so be
              careful.

       ‘n’    You can also shot SMALLER missiles.  You have ten of these.

       <Ret>  If you hit <Ret>, you’ll be able to write a message to  send  it
              to  all  the other players.  That’s correct, you can use Matanza
              as a full featured chat and all.  You could  even  have  net.sex
              using it, but don’t even get me started on the subject.

       `z’    Shows you stats about the game.

       ‘c’    Removes the last message from the list of messages.

       ‘C’    Cleans the list of messages.

       ‘s’    Swaps the position of the list of messages.

       ‘p’    Pauses the game.

       ‘v’    Toggles  whether  or not you see the messages.  Sometimes you’ll
              want to disable them.

       ‘i’    Make your ship invisible!  But beware,  you  may  only  make  it
              invisible  for  a  short  period  of time, after that it becomes
              visible again and you can’t become invisible anymore.

       ‘q’    Quit the game.

       The following is a list of important command line arguments;  this  was
       last
              updated for version 0.12, though some are still missing.

       --help This shows the list of command line arguments and exits.

       --version
              Use this to know the version of the server.

       --max-players=NUM
              If you want to make it so the server  will  allow  at  most  NUM
              players to enter the world at any given moment, use this option.

       --bold This instructs the server to use bold characters when  rendering
              images  to  ASCII art.  It improves the quality of the rendering
              (as of version 0.9 it still has some bugs).

       --imgwidth=NUM
              This changes the  default  image  width  (for  the  zoom).   The
              default is 320.

       --health=NUM
              Use this option to set the maximum damage a ship can take before
              it is destroyed.  It defaults to 1000.

       --mapsize-x=NUM --mapsize-y=NUM
              These options allow you to change the map size.  If you make  it
              smaller, players will come across each other more often.  On the
              other hand, if you plan to have a lot of players, you might want
              to increase the size.  The default is 1200 x 1000.

       --lives=NUM
              With  this option you can change the number of lives each player
              (or team: see --no-share) gets at startup.

       --angles=NUM
              During its initialization, Matanza calculates rotations for  all
              its  images  (ships,  missiles,  asteroids,  etc.).   It uses 64
              different angles by default.  You  may  change  this  number  to
              increase its quality or decrease its memory consumption.

       --no-chat
              If you use this option, you will disallow the chat feature.  The
              only reason I can think why someone would want to do that  would
              be  to  keep  newbies from entering the chat buffer and becoming
              unable to control their ships.  Or perhaps  to  make  some  team
              games  more  exciting  by  preventing  the  players  to exchange
              information (though I know it would be very easy to cheat).

       --team=STR
              If you want to play in teams mode, you will use this option once
              for  every  team,  specifing its name.  Before joining the game,
              all players must select the team they will play in.

       --password[=STR]
              You can instruct the server to only accept players who know  the
              password.  This might be good for some tournaments.

       --teams-safe
              This  option  is  only  meaningful  in  teams mode.  By default,
              bullets from a given player hurt everyone, not only players from
              the  other  teams.  This option changes that behaviour and makes
              it so bullets from a given player won’t hurt players in the same
              team.

       --no-share
              This  option  is only meaningful in teams mode.  By default, all
              the teams have a pool of lives; when a  player  dies,  he  comes
              back  to  play and the team has one life less.  When this option
              is specified, the lives are no longer shared so each player  has
              its own pool of lives.

       --ang-speed-max=NUM
              Maximum angular speed for ships (try 0)

       --fly-back
              If   this   option  is  specified,  players  will  be  acelerate
              backwards.

       --brake
              Players will be able to brake using ‘j’ (or the down arrow).

       --air  Ships’ speed depend on their direction.

       --speed-max=NUM
              Set the maximum speed for the ships to NUM.  A value of 0  makes
              this unlimited.

       --asteroids=NUM
              With  this option you can specify how many asteroids you want at
              a given moment.  If you use ‘0’, you will disable  this  feature
              and the memory requirements will decrease.

       --limits
              Give the world limits; make it end

       --no-radar
              When enemy is away, don’t show the direction

       --invisible=NUM
              Allow players to become invisible for NUM rounds

       --ppc=NUM
              PPC  stands  for  Players Per Connection.  With this option, you
              will be able to set the number of  ships  each  connection  will
              have.   For  the  moment, the only supported values are 1 and 2.
              The keyboard bindings change and those for a value of 2 are  not
              yet documented.

       --bg=PATH
              PATH  should  be the path to a JPEG file.  Matanza will load the
              information in the file and use it  as  the  background,  rather
              than  showing  the  dots.   This  will  only work if libjpeg was
              installed when you compiled Matanza.

       --mapsize-img
              This option will be ignored unless  ‘--bg’  is  also  used.   It
              tells  Matanza  to set the map’s size to be the width and height
              of the background image.  When used, the options ‘-x’  and  ‘-y’
              are ignored.

       --ship-img=FILE
              Through  this  option you can specify a file name for Matanza to
              load the images for the ships from it.  The format for the  file
              is very simple, consult ship.txt for more details.

SEE ALSO

       Please read the extensive README file for more documentation.

       telnet(1)

BUGS

       Alejandro Forero Cuervo <alejo@bachue.com>

                                                                    matanza(1)