Interface

(NB: Complete to 1.01 only: see What's Newfor new features.)
When it is your turn, click on a cell to place the next atom. The computer player will respond by placing another atom. If no explosions are caused by the computer's move, don't be surprised if you don't see the move. If this happens, just make your next move anyway.

You will also notice a status bar at the bottom of the window. When playing against A.I. or Bill Kocay opponents, this bar shows approximately how much thinking the computer has done for its next move. You will probably notice that it starts thinking before your explosions have finished.

status_bar.jpg

Other than that, most game options are on the menus. So here are the menus, with a description of what each item does.

Game Menu:

game_menu.jpg

Red and Blue Menus:

red_blue_menus.jpg

These menus set what kind of players are in the game.


Options:

options_menu.jpg

Priority:

priority_menu.jpg

When playing against Bill Kocay (the hardest level), the brain is multi-threaded. This menu allows you to change the priority assigned to the threads. The options provided are the standard priorities in BeOS.

Please note that you should normally restrict yourself to the top two priorities, since game prediction is a classic low-priority, non-interactive task.

However, for seriously geeky folk, you can set the priority so that the brain threads pre-empt all other tasks in the system (such as mouse movement and menus). If you attempt to set the priority to one of the "real-time" values (the bottom 3), you will get a dialog box warning you that you will slow all other processing down. Note that you will not damage anything this way, but you may have to wait for the game to finish before doing anything else!

priority_dialog.jpg

Help:

help_menu.jpg