Customizing GNOME Robots II

You can modify the behaviour and appearance of the game by selecting the properties dialog by clicking on Preferences of Settings. There are three pages to the dialog:-

• Configuration — This page allows you to choose the type of game you want to play. The drop-down box at the top of the page allows you to choos from a number of predefined games, and the list-box below it shows the settings for that game.

  1. The safe moves option will help you to avoid being killed due to a mistake. If you try to make a move that would lead to your death when there is a safe move available you will not be allowed to procceed. But be warned if there was no safe move available, other than teleporting, the move will be allowed to proceed.

  2. There is also a ``super safe mode''. If you select this, you get beeped when there is no safe move and your only option is to teleport out.

  3. If you select the sound check-box the game will play sounds for various events throughout the game. If you do not have ESD installed the game will beep using the computer speaker only on invalid moves.

  4. The 'Splats' checkbox selects whether you want and sound played and a small 'Splat!' to appear on the screen.

• Graphics — This page allows you to select the graphics used throughout the game from the list in the dropdown-box. You will get a preview of the graphics below it.

• Keyboard — This screen allows you to define your own keyboard controls.

You can design your own graphics for the game if you want. The graphics files are found in $PREFIX/share/pixmaps/gnobots2 , where $PREFIX depends on where Gnome was installed, usually either /usr or /usr/local.

Each character is 16x16 pixels and there are 14 of them arranged in a PNG file which is 224x16 pixels in size. You can look at the existing files to see the order in which they must be arranged to produce the correct animated sequences.

Any graphics files which are placed in the directory are auto-detected so you don't need to alter any configuration files. You can also define your own game configurations by creating extra .cfg files which are stored in the $PREFIX/share/gnobots2 directory.