%ents; ]> Josef Weidendorfer Philip Rodrigues

philip.rodrigues@libertysurf.co.uk

Lauri Watts

vampyr@atconnex.net

Reviewer 20/01/2001 1.06.00 2001 Philip Rodrigues &FDLNotice; &kabalone; is a simple board strategy game that is played by two players. KDE game abalone linux &kabalone; is a simple board strategy game that is played by two players. There are red and yellow pieces for each player. Beginning from a start position where each player has 14 pieces, moves are drawn until one player has pushed 6 of his opponent's pieces out of the board. The original program was developed in 1993 for DOS and pure Xlib. For &kde; there was a major rewrite. The game idea is not by me. It is a real board game vendored by a German game producing firm (I believe). Red always moves first. Two types of moves are allowed: Normal One, two or three pieces of yours in a row can be moved be one in the 6 directions. Side moves are also allowed. Press the left mouse button on the first piece you want to move. The piece will then be highlighted. Now drag the mouse in the desired direction. If the move is valid, the cursor will change to an arrow in that direction and all the pieces of the move will be highlighted. If this is the move you want to draw, release the mouse button. Side moves are handled another way: For two adjacent pieces click between them and drag; for three pieces press the middle mouse button on the middle piece - if a side move is allowed for the pieces they will be highlighted. Otherwise only the middle one is highlighted and you draw a normal move. Pushing You can push a maximum of two pieces of the opponent in front of your own pieces as long as the number of pieces you move is greater than the number of the opponent's pieces that you push. That means with three of your pieces you can push one or two of the opponent's and with two pieces one. Special pushing moves are those which push a piece of the opponent out of the board. If you have pushed six of your opponent's pieces out of the board you have won. If you still do not know what &kabalone; is all about, look at a game where the computer plays both sides. After executing &kabalone;, select SettingsComputer playsBoth and start a new game. &kabalone; supports playing across a network. This allows two people to play against each other on different computers, or one person to observe the game play of another &kabalone; program. To use &kabalone;'s network features, &kabalone; must be set to Network Mode by selecting GameNetwork. All running &kabalone; programs which are in Network Mode broadcast changed positions to each other. To exchange positions, the &kabalone; programs have to be told about each other. If they are running on the same machine, nothing is needed (apart from switching to Network Mode). If running on different computers you have to specify the other's machine on the command line with the -h switch, as so: %kabalone -h SomeHostName For insiders: &kabalone;, when in Network Mode, listens on a TCP socket for position change commands by other Abalone programs. You can specify the port number with the -p command line switch. You need this if you want to play two different Abalone Network games. Chris on machine1 and Mary on machine2 want to play against each other: Mary simply starts &kabalone;, sets OptionsComputer plays to None and switches to Network Mode. Chris starts &kabalone; with %kabalone -h machine2 and then does the same as Mary. Now one of the two can start the game and draw a red move. Each time the position is changed in one program, it automatically changes in the other one too. John wants to observe the game: He does the same as Chris, but doesn't draw a move himself. Two different &kabalone; Network Games will run among machines m1 and m2. To distinguish the games, we choose port number 12345 for one. On m1 we start as usual: %kabalone for the first game, and (not so usual): %kabalone -p 12345 for the second. On m2 we start the first game with: %kabalone -h m1 and the second with: %kabalone -h m1:12345 (The colon separates host and port as in a &URL;). You can edit the actual board position by selecting EditModify to put &kabalone; in Modify Mode.You can add red or yellow pieces or delete them. The status line shows the number of red and yellow pieces, the move number, the side which is to draw the next move, and whether the position is valid: An exclamation sign means no, a checked symbol yes. If the position is invalid and you switch back to normal Play Mode, you can't play! Only valid positions can be used as a starting position for a game. Take back and Forward simply decrement and increment the move number, but don't change any pieces. By pressing the left or right mouse button on an empty or yellow field, you enter Red piece Adding mode; by pressing the middle button on an empty or red field, you get in Yellow piece Adding mode. Finally by pressing the left or the right mouse button on a red piece, or the middle mouse button on an yellow piece, you enter Piece Deleting Mode. Any piece that the mouse passes over with the button pressed will be deleted. To exit Modify Mode and re-enter Play Mode, just uncheck Modify in the Edit menu. The current &kabalone; board can be copied to the clipboard using the Copy command in the Edit menu, and then pasted back in usng Paste. This way you can copy the board positions of one &kabalone; program to another by pressing Copy in one program and Paste in the other, but this is better done with Network Mode (see above). Another usage is to save positions into a text file (using Copy and your Editor of choice) and retrieve a position later by selecting it in the editor and pasting in &kabalone;. The computer can play at four different levels, namely: Easy Normal Hard Challenge The harder the setting, the longer the computer searches for a move. You can interrupt the search by pressing the S key. Spying can be turned on and off from the Settings menu, and the Spy option. If it is your turn, you can see the computer's rating of the move you want to play in the status bar. If it's the computer's turn you can see (in status bar and highlighted pieces) the move he actually thinks is the best to play. Of course this changes along his search. You can make the computer play Red, Yellow or both sides. Choose between these options before starting a new game. Of course it works in a game too if you want to change sides. Choose None to play against another human. This is very useful in Network Mode. Drawing moves is explained under Rules of the Game. The buttons in the toolbar have the same meaning as entries in the Game or Edit menu. &Ctrl;N Game New Starts a new game even if a game is currently in play. S Game Stop Search When the computer is thinking, his depth search is interrupted and he draws the best move he has found so far. PgUp GameTake Back Take back your previous move. Two (!) moves are undone: the opponents move and your last move. So it's your turn again. 100 moves are remembered; so don't hesitate to take back moves until you are at the beginning of the game (faster with the F2 key). When in Modify mode (see EditModify below), decrement move number of this position. PgDown GameForward Only useful in Modify mode: Increment move number of this position. H GameHint A hint for your next move is shown. Only possible if you play at level normal or above, the move number is 2 or greater and you have not undone your move. N GameNetwork Play If this toggle is switched on, the application is in Network Mode. &Ctrl;Q GameQuit Quits&kabalone;. &Ctrl;C EditCopy Copy a representation of the &kabalone; board to the clipboard &Ctrl;V EditPaste Interpret the content of the X clipboard as an ASCII representation of a &kabalone; board, and copy it to the current board. A valid ASCII representation is generated by Copy. CtrlIns EditModify Switches &kabalone; to Modify Mode. &Ctrl;S EditSave Position Save the actual position to be retrieved later with Edit Restore Position . &Ctrl;O EditRestore Position Restore the board position stored in the &kabalone; Configuration file by Edit Save Position. &Ctrl; M Settings Show Menubar Shows or hides the &kabalone; Menubar. SettingsShow Toolbar Shows or hides the &kabalone; Toolbar. SettingsShow Statusbar Shows or hides the &kabalone; Statusbar at the base of the screen. SettingsSave Settings Saves the current settings to become the default for &kabalone;. SettingsConfigure Key Bindings... Brings up the standard &kde; key bindings configuration window to customize thekey bindings used by &kabalone;. SettingsConfigure Toolbars... Brings up the standard &kde; toolbar configuration window to customize the &kabalone; toolbar. SettingsLevel Select the level that the computer plays at. Can be one of: Easy Normal Hard Challenge SettingsComputer Plays Choose which colours the computer plays. Can be one of: Red Yellow Both None SettingsMove Slow A move drawn by the computer when this option is checked is shown by blinking and highlighting the pieces used in this move. Uncheck this option if you don't want to wait for this animation: Then only a quick highlighting is done. SettingsRender Balls If checked, the pieces are rendered online by an internal simple ray tracer when needed (⪚ when resizing the window). SettingsSpy If checked: Turns on spying. kabalone -p MyPortNumber -h host:Port With -p you specify the port number of the listening TCP socket when in Network Mode. With -h you specify a remote &kabalone; process (with optional port number, when not using the default port on the remote machine) to communicate with when in Network mode. You can specify multiple remote processes. &kabalone; Program copyright 1997-2000 Josef Weidendorfer weidendo@informatik.tu-muenchen.de Original Documentation by Robert Williams rwilliams@kde.org and Josef Weidendorfer Documentation updated for &kde; 2.0 by Philip Rodrigues philip.rodrigues@libertysurf.co.uk &underFDL; &underGPL; &kabalone; is part of the &kde; Project http://www.kde.org. &kabalone; can be found in the kdegames package on ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/, the main &FTP; site of the &kde; project. All required libraries can also be found on The &kde; &FTP; site. In order to compile and install &kabalone; on your system, type the following in the &kabalone; directory in the kdegames distribution: % ./configure % make % make install Since &kabalone; uses autoconf and automake you should have not trouble compiling it. Should you run into problems please report them to the author at weidendo@informatik.tu-muenchen.de