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TAWS3 is, as you may have guessed, the 3rd game in a series of “Text Adventures Without Swords”. TAWS3 is a strategic fighting game that changes dynamic the more players join in.
Each player has 4 stats: health, strength, stamina, and armor. At the start of the contest each player’s stats are equal. Each turn is two phase. In the first phase you can adjust your own stats using one of the following commands:
“status” : see how you are doing.
“players” : see who is playing this contest.
“heal” : Restore lost health up to 2 times your stamina.
“strength” : Increase your attack strength.
“stamina” : Improve your stamina.
“armor” : Improve your armor rating.
“help” : get a hint in game.
Then in phase 2 you choose which player you will attack.
Like chess, this is a somewhat intellectual game, a simple game with depth and complexity, an open strategy game where individual games can last seemly stable for several rounds and fall apart quickly with a clever move. The addition of more players changes the strategy and dynamic dramatically.
TAWS3 was written by “Entar”.
October 2nd, 2009 - 8:17 am
:/ It doesn’t work well on Wine. You have to use fflush(stdout) after each call to printf() or else I’m not guaranteed to see the text when I need to. I’d suggest writing a print() function that calls printf() then fflush(). If you use C++, the ‘endl’ stream manipulator flushes the stream as well. I haven’t tried the other TAWS, but I would assume the same thing holds.
October 2nd, 2009 - 9:02 am
Well there’s a combination I wouldn’t have thought, or been able, to check.
I think it’s more to do with the way input is being handled. Why the standard scanf(”%50s”,blah) wasn’t used I don’t know. Looks to me like this code is a splicing of C with C++, which is odd because it usually goes the other way. No wonder it’s causing fits.
October 2nd, 2009 - 9:06 am
Jonny D: Why don’t you compile it yourself and not use Wine? It’s only two source files, that couldn’t be too hard to compile.
October 4th, 2009 - 1:34 pm
Ah, that would be altogether too easy. I guess Wine hangs on to the buffer longer than is healthy for this game. fflush should fix it, but a native binary worked fine. Nice call, Fink!
Also, I broke the rules of TAWS:
Guy with sword’s turn (part 1): str
Guy with sword’s strength increased to 5.0
Guy with sword’s turn (part 2): Bob
Guy with sword damaged Bob for 4 damage!