HUNT(6)
NAME
hunt - a multi-player multi-terminal game
SYNOPSIS
/usr/games/hunt [ -qmcsfbS ] [ -n name ] [ -t team ] [ -p
port ] [ -w message ] [ host ]
DESCRIPTION
The object of the game hunt is to kill off the other play-
ers. There are no rooms, no treasures, and no monsters.
Instead, you wander around a maze, find grenades, trip
mines, and shoot down walls and players. The more players
you kill before you die, the better your score is. If the
-m flag is given, you enter the game as a monitor (you can
see the action but you cannot play).
Hunt normally looks for an active game on the local net-
work; if none is found, it starts one up on the local
host. The location of the game may be specified by giving
the host argument. This presupposes that a hunt game is
already running on that host, see huntd(6) for details on
how to setup a game on a specific host. If more than one
game if found, you may pick which game to play in.
If the -q flag is given, hunt queries the local network
(or specific host) and reports on all active games found.
This is useful for shell startup scripts, e.g. csh's
.login.
The player name may be specified on the command line by
using the -n option.
The -c, -s, and -f options are for entering the game
cloaked, scanning, or flying respectively.
The -b option turns off beeping when you reach the typea-
head limit.
The -t option aids team playing by making everyone else on
one's team appear as the team name. A team name is a sin-
gle digit to avoid conflicting with other characters used
in the game.
The -p port option allows the rendezvous port number to be
set. This is a useful way for people playing on dialup
lines to avoid playing with people on 9600 baud terminals.
The -w message option is the only way to send a message to
everyone else's screen when you start up. It is most
often used to say ``eat slime death - NickD's coming in''.
When you die and are asked if you wish to re-enter the
game, there are other answers than just yes or no. You
can also reply with a w for write a message before
continuing or o to change how you enter the game (cloaked,
scanning, or flying).
To be notified automatically when a hunt starts up, add
your login to the hunt-players mailing list (see
huntd(6)).
PLAYING HINTS
Hunt only works on crt (vdt) terminals with at least 24
lines, 80 columns, and cursor addressing. The screen is
divided in to 3 areas. On the right hand side is the sta-
tus area. It shows damage sustained, charges remaining,
who's in the game, who's scanning (the ``*'' in front of
the name), who's cloaked (the ``+'' in front of the name),
and other players' scores. The rest of the screen is
taken up by your map of the maze. The 24th line is used
for longer messages that don't fit in the status area.
Hunt uses the same keys to move as vi(1) does, i.e., h, j,
k, and l for left, down, up, right respectively. To
change which direction you're facing in the maze, use the
upper case version of the movement key (i.e., HJKL). You
can only fire or throw things in the direction you're fac-
ing.
Other commands are:
f or 1- Fire a bullet (Takes 1 charge)
g or 2- Throw grenade (Takes 9 charges)
F or 3- Throw satchel charge (Takes 25 charges)
G or 4- Throw bomb (Takes 49 charges)
5 - Throw big bomb (Takes 81 charges)
6 - Throw even bigger bomb (Takes 121 charges)
7 - Throw even more big bomb (Takes 169 charges)
8 - Throw even more bigger bomb (Takes 225 charges)
9 - Throw very big bomb (Takes 289 charges)
0 - Throw very, very big bomb (Takes 361 charges)
@ - Throw biggest bomb (Takes 441 charges)
o - Throw small slime (Takes 15 charges)
O - Throw big slime (Takes 30 charges)
p - Throw bigger slime (Takes 45 charges)
P - Throw biggest slime (Takes 60 charges)
s - Scan (show where other players are) (Takes 1 charge)
c - Cloak (hide from scanners) (Takes 1 charge)
^L - Redraw screen
q - Quit
The symbols on the screen are:
-|+ - walls
/\ - diagonal (deflecting) walls
# - doors (dispersion walls)
; - small mine
g - large mine
: - bullet
o - grenade
O - satchel charge
@ - bomb
s - small slime
$ - big slime
><^v - you facing right, left, up, or down
}{i! - other players facing right, left, up, or down
* - explosion
\|/
-*- - grenade and large mine explosion
/|\
Other helpful hints:
[] You can only fire in the direction you are facing.
[] You can only fire three shots in a row, then the gun
must cool off.
[] Shots move 5 times faster than you do.
[] To stab someone, you face that player and move at them.
[] Stabbing does 2 points worth of damage and shooting
does 5 points.
[] Slime does 5 points of damage each time it hits.
[] You start with 15 charges and get 5 more every time a
player enters or re-enters.
[] Grenade explosions cover a 3 by 3 area, each larger
bomb cover a correspondingly larger area (ranging from
5 by 5 to 21 by 21). All explosions are centered
around the square the shot hits and do the most damage
in the center.
[] Slime affects all squares it oozes over. The number of
squares is equal to the number of charges used.
[] One small mine and one large mine is placed in the maze
for every new player. A mine has a 2% probability of
tripping when you walk forward on to it; 50% when going
sideways; 95% when backing up. Tripping a mine costs
you 5 points or 10 points respectively. Defusing a
mine is worth 1 charge or 9 charges respectively.
[] You cannot see behind you.
[] Cloaking consumes 1 ammo charge per 20 of your moves.
[] Scanning consumes 1 ammo charge per (20 x the number of
players) of other player moves.
[] Turning on cloaking turns off scanning -- turning on
scanning turns off cloaking.
[] When you kill someone, you get 2 more damage capacity
points and 2 damage points get taken away.
[] Maximum typeahead is 5 characters.
[] A shot destroys normal (i.e., non-diagonal, non-door)
walls.
[] Diagonal walls deflect shots and change orientation.
[] Doors disperse shots in random directions (up, down,
left, right).
[] Diagonal walls and doors cannot be destroyed by direct
shots but may be destroyed by an adjacent grenade
explosion.
[] Slime goes around walls, not through them.
[] Walls regenerate, reappearing in the order they were
destroyed. One percent of the regenerated walls will
be diagonal walls or doors. When a wall is generated
directly beneath a player, he is thrown in a random
direction for a random period of time. When he lands,
he sustains damage (up to 20 percent of the amount of
damage already sustained); i.e., the less damage he
had, the more nimble he is and therefore less likely to
hurt himself on landing.
[] Every 30 deaths or so, a ``?'' will appear. It is a
wandering bomb which will explode when it hits someone,
or when it is slimed.
[] If no one moves, everything stands still.
[] The environment variable HUNT is checked to get the
player name. If you don't have this variable set, hunt
will ask you what name you want to play under. If you
wish to set other options than just your name, you can
enumerate the options as follows:
setenv HUNT "name=Sneaky,team=1,cloak,map-
key=zoFfGg1f2g3F4G"
sets the player name to Sneaky, sets the team to one,
sets the enter game attribute to cloaked, and the maps
z to o, F to f, G to g, 1 to f, 2 to g, 3 to F, and 4
to G. The mapkey option must be last. Other options
are: scan, fly, nobeep, port=string, host=string, and
message=string -- which correspond to the command line
options. String options cannot contain commas since
commas are used to separate options.
[] It's a boring game if you're the only one playing.
Your score is the decayed average of the ratio of number
of kills to number of times you entered the game and is
only kept for the duration of a single session of hunt.
Hunt normally drives up the load average to be approxi-
mately (number_of_players + 0.5) greater than it would be
without a hunt game executing.
STATISTICS
The -S option fetches the current game statistics. The
meaning of the column headings are as follows: score --
the player's last score; ducked -- how many shots a player
ducked; absorb -- how many shots a player absorbed; faced
-- how many shots were fired at player's face; shot -- how
many shots were fired at player; robbed -- how many of
player's shots were absorbed; missed -- how many of
player's shots were ducked; slimeK -- how many slime kills
player had; enemy -- how many enemies were killed; friend
-- how many friends were killed (self and same team);
deaths -- how many times player died; still -- how many
times player died without typing in any commands; saved --
how many times a shot/bomb would have killed player if he
hadn't ducked or absorbed it.
FILES
/usr/sbin/huntd game coordinator
SEE ALSO
huntd(6)
AUTHORS
Conrad Huang, Ken Arnold, and Greg Couch;
University of California, San Francisco, Computer Graphics
Lab
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank Don Kneller, John Thomason, Eric Pettersen, Mark
Day, and Scott Weiner for providing endless hours of play-
testing to improve the character of the game. We hope
their significant others will forgive them; we certainly
don't.
BUGS
To keep up the pace, not everything is as realistic as
possible.