acm Flight Simulator version 3.1 What is acm? ------------ Acm is a LAN-oriented, multiplayer aerial combat simulation. My main design objective was to provide source code that could be easily compiled and executed on a wide variety of platforms. To that end, acm is written entirely in C, exploiting the programming features of Unix, X11, and the BSD socket interface. Players engage in air to air combat against one another using heat seeking missiles and cannons. Riley Rainey riley@mips.com May 22, 1991 AND NOW FOR THE NEW PART: What has happened since version 2.4 ? ------------------------------------- In the last months, I added some nice features to acm and I thought it might be now appropriate to make it public to anybody interested. NEW FEATURES ------------ a) It is now possible to use multiple acm servers together over a LAN: These servers communicate via broadcasts the positions and other important information to each other, so one or two players may use one server together and a new server can be started if the performace drops on a single server. b) Interesting messages about the game are now displayed within each players window, e.g. who has been shot down by whom or the list of players. c) Any player shot down may now keep his window for some seconds to see what is happening (especially useful if he wants to find out who has shot him down) d) Every player may now give himself a nickname e) An observer plane has been introduced to safely watch the actions of the active players in the game. This observer can freely be moved within the air-space or it can pursuit any plane in some distance (and can of course change the viewpoint). f) It is now possible to fly at night (different color-settings and some stars have been added). g) It is now possible to score points: Whenever a pilot shoots down another plane he receives some points for this; these points can be accumulated and be traded against fuel, missiles, bullets and repair. Moreover, the points can be saved in a file for the next day. h) The gear has now its necessity: Don't try to pull the gear up when you are on the ground :->> i) Players are now warned whenever another pilot has his radar locked onto their own plane and a warning bell sounds, if a missile has been started into his direction. j) The window can now be left by the mouse pointer when the 'stick'/mouse- position has been frozen (to a certain position). k) Every player can only start a limited number of drones (target planes) Moreover, it is possible to start a drone behind the player's plane (more difficult to find and shoot down). l) Informations about all players can now be requested from the server: - Who is currently playing ? - Who am I gunning for ? m) Players with a certain score will now be promoted to be 'Aces' (which means they will become the primary target for anybody playing :-) n) For each server can be determined how fast it will run (i.e. display) o) The IEEE-754 Floating Point standard is now supported. ENVIRONMENTS ------------ I ported this program quite successfully to several machines: - Sun Sparc (Slc, Elc, Sparc2, Sparc10) running SunOS4.1.x and X11R5 - IBM RS6000 running aix V 3.2 and X11R4 - DecStations (3100, 5000) running Ultrix and X11R4 - Dec Alpha (3000) running OSF/1 and X11R5 - PC's running Linux and X11R5 - HP 9000/7xx running HP/UX A.09.00 and X11R5 CREDITS ------- I built this version from acm.2.4 written by Riley Rainey taking over a very large part of this release (e.g. nearly every graphics routine). REMARK ------ Because I didn't manage to contact Riley Rainey, this release might not match his idea of versioning, so it might be possible, that there are several different acm releases crawling around InterNetLand (although I tried to make sure that doesn't happen). In case anybody knows Riley's whereabouts, I'd be glad to contact him (the address at mips.com is no longer valid, and the respective postmaster couldn't help me). FORMAT ------ After decompressing the file, 'untar' it with 'tar xvf acm.3.1.tar'. Next, 'cd' to 'Acm', type 'xmkmf -a', edit the file 'Acm/fsim/manifest.h' according to your wishes; finally, type 'make' and anything should be built ok ('make install' to have it installed). Kaiserslautern, August 26, 1993 Michael Baentsch (baentsch@informatik.uni-kl.de)