xonix - a game

xonix [ -toolkitoption ... ]

The xonix application consists of a playing area and a status display below.

The status display shows the current values for level, filled area (in percent), number of players (lifes), and elapsed time.

The playing area has several regions. The brown region (initially only the border) is ``filled region'', where the player can move, starting from the top left corner. Beware of the bouncing yellow eater(s) that do also move across filled regions however, if they hit the player, a life will go away. The flyers can only bounce across the green (so-called empty) area in the middle.

The purpose of the game is to move the player across the empty region (whereby it leaves his way in a brown color to show where it came along), and finally cut off a piece of unfilled region by moving him back to some filled region. If the player itself or the (unfilled yet) way will be hit by a flyer, a life will be lost again. Once the player's way reached another part of filled region, the way and all adjacent unfilled regions where there is no flyer in will be filled in turn. One level has completed as soon as 75 % of the originally unfilled area have been filled this way.

Every level, there will be one flyer more. Every second level, an additional player will be granted. Every fifth level, an additional eater will be fired off.

The default keys to move the player around are the arrow keys. This can be changed in the app-defaults file, however, as well as the timeout between single steps (defaulting to 50 ms equal 20 moves per second).

The default keys to immediately quit the game are `Q' and `Escape'. Hitting `P' or iconizing the window with the window manager will pause the game; de-iconizing will continue it.

There is also a high-score file, /var/lib/X11/xonix.scores. It records the top ten xonix players for that machine. As a special compile-time option, a mail is sent to the previous xonix score leader when he's lost his first rank.

Xonix uses the X Toolkit and the Athena Widget Set. Below is the widget structure of the xonix application. Indentation indicates hierarchical structure. The widget class name is given first, followed by the widget instance name.

	Xonix  xonix
		VendorShellExt  shellext
		Form  container
			MenuButton  game_button
			Canvas  canvas
			Form  status
				Form  level
					Label  lev_label
					Label  lev_d10
					Label  lev_d1
				Form  percentage
					Label  perc_label
					Label  perc_d10
					Label  perc_d1
				Form  runner
					Label  run_label
					Label  run_d10
					Label  run_d1
				Form  time
					Label  time_label
					Label  mins_d10
					Label  mins_d1
					Label  time_colon
					Label  secs_d10
					Label  secs_d1
			SimpleMenu  game_menu
				SmeBSB  about
				SmeLine  game_l1
				SmeBSB  quit
		TransientShell  about_shell
			VendorShellExt  shellext
			Box  about_box
				Label  about_msg
				Command  about_done
		TransientShell  gameover_shell
			VendorShellExt  shellext
			Box  gameover_box
				Label  gameover_msg
				Box  gameover_buttonbox
					Command  gameover_iknow
					Command  gameover_goon

All the standard toolkit options apply. It's not particularly useful to attempt forcing any geometry however.

The original xonix game has been seen somewhere on an old PC/XT clone. This is a reimplementation from scratch, done by starting the project on a Macintosh. The X11 support has been written by with the pleasant help by

Source code comments are still mostly in German. Some files require the unusal tab width of 4 in order to be displayed correctly.

It should be possible to pass some parameters from the command line as well (e.g. the time step value), which is currently only possible by the back-door via the -xrm toolkit option.

Mail any suggestions to <joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de>.