Yatris - Yet Another Bricks Game
INTRODUCTION
I started writing Yatris in March 2001, basically as an exercise in X11
programming. It is a falling bricks game inspired from Tetris (TM),
and, in fact, one could use Yatris to play Tetris (TM).
You might find some of the features of this game bizarre and/or
superfluous, but I'll keep on adding such features for the purpose of
getting myself acquanted to various programming techniques. So the
yacc-generated parser for the brickset definition files will be
followed-up with gettext localisation, wide characters support, Xt and
Athena widgets, and who knows what else. I'll try to made it possible
to compile at least some of those out, for those of you who just want
to play a plain old game of yatris!
BACKGROUND
Heidi Burgiel calculated an "unwinnable" tetris game, that is if you
get this sequence of blocks it's impossible to survive no matter how
well you place them:
http://www.geom.umn.edu/about/people/home/burgiel.html
http://www.geom.umn.edu/java/tetris/
http://synergy.design.ucla.edu/gallery/kobashik/tetris/theory/tetrislinks.html
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Copyright/copyright.html
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/2430/tetris.html
http://www.suck.com/daily/98/12/02/nc_index4.html
Battle Tetris:
http://www.catseye.com/linux/jetris.html
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An important resourse was Hugo Eide Gunnarsen's xtet42 tetris clone.
My thanks to Hugo for writing xtet42 and GPL'ing it: he might
recognise the code for drawing the blocks from which the bricks are
made. Other important sources of information about X11 were Adrian
Nye's "Xlib Programming Manual" and, of couse, the X11 man pages that
come with FreeBSD and HP-UX.
I wanted to provide a link to xtet42, but couldn't find its home page.
But if you google for it you'll find the tarball available for
download all over the place. I couldn't find the 1992 version I used
though, and I don't think I even have it anywhere in my filesystem
anymore.
Last Update: 30-05-2005