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Welcome to KLACK!. KLACK! is a game consisting of four spheres, a rotating pointer, time and score counters and just one key per player. Read more for details.

News

2002-02-06 This is the birth of our new webpage design. It undos the bad screen usage of the old version by using different files for different languages.
By the way, since Jerry joined in we are planning a rewrite using SDL, so stay tuned.

The Game

Ok, let's start with a screenshot and then get to the rules one by one:

Center of the game are the spheres. You can accelerate yours by pressing your key. The player keys are: Tab, Space, Keypad-Plus and Mouse Whenever a sphere collides with another, points may be awarded or removed from the player's score. You will notice the pointer in the lower right of the window. It shows the direction of the actual acceleration. In the lower left, all player scores are shown. Right beneath the scoreboard, a timer is showing the seconds left until the game ends. Between the timer and the direction pointer is a small diagram showing the rules for awarding points. Everyone starts with zero points and nobody can get less than zero points. In the diagram, a green arrow means that a point is awarded, and a red arrow means a point is removed. A black arrow means the points are carried over. By now, we have two game modi: Shuffle: The original game. You control (more or less) the green sphere, and try to let the yellow sphere hit the blue sphere while avoiding the red sphere. Fair enough, hu? Cascade: This Four-Player-game is quite easy to explain: Bump into your right neighbor, but don't get hit by the left. Naturally, the leftmost player has to fear the rightmost.

Showing the game screen (Click for detail)

License

KLACK is released under terms of the GNU General Public License. This means, in short, you can freely copy, distribute and modify the game as long as every part or modification you distribute is covered by the GNU GPL. This ensures that KLACK stays free software.

Download and Installation

By now we can only provide you with the old version of the game. You can grab it right here: klack.tgz (63197 bytes)
To install, just untar the package with tar xzvf klack.tgz; it will create a subdirectory called klack. Enter this subdirectory and type make. This will work on most *nix-based systems with X11. If it does not work, wait for the rewrite.
Caution: Be warned that this version is unsupported now.

Known Bugs

• Spheres may bump into or even through each other. I now have the outlines of an improved algorithm that does vector clipping.
• After a cascade game only player 1's score is shown.
• The manpage is incomplete and needs translation.

The Team

Momentarily, the so-called Team consists of two members,

• Andre Kloss, who started the original development and
• Jerry Cheung, who joined in to do a rewrite of the game.

     last modified:
2002-02-06 by Andre