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ZTRACK(6)                            Games                           ZTRACK(6)

NAME
       ztrack - simple curses-based pseudo-3D driving game

SYNOPSIS
       ztrack

DESCRIPTION
       Ztrack is a simple curses-based pseudo-3D driving game. It's loosely
       based on an old LCD game, I think it was Casio's "Turbo Drive", that I
       used to spend far too long playing. As such, the graphics are fairly
       simplistic, but what do you expect from a curses-based driving game!?

GAMEPLAY
       You have to get as far as you can down an infinitely long three-track
       road populated with stupid, but dangerous, computer-controlled cars.
       You score most for doing it at your top speed of 150 MPH, but you can
       do it more slowly if you enjoy doing pointless boring things.

       Cars can't crash into you from behind, but you can crash into them from
       behind, and you can also crash by moving into a lane already occupied.
       Though you can't directly see cars level with you (that thing down the
       bottom is your bonnet/hood in case you hadn't figured it out), the
       things which happen to look like square brackets are in fact the edges
       of your wing mirrors, and a blob appears in these when a car is level
       with you in the relevant lane.

       You get three lives/cars, so when you've crashed three times it's game
       over.

KEYS
       Rather than holding a button to accelerate etc. which is clearly rather
       impractical, you instead set an acceleration mode. This can be any of
       'accel', 'decel', or 'const'. The latter is basically a perfect cruise
       control. Q sets accel mode, A sets decel mode, and Space or Tab set
       const mode. O moves left a lane, P moves right a lane.

BUGS
       Ztrack needs at least an 80x24 screen. It doesn't bother aborting if
       the screen is smaller, and doesn't use any more if the screen is
       bigger.

       There's no sensation of speed apart from the cars. This is a bit tricky
       to do much about.

       The computer car logic is virtually non-existent. It gets sufficiently
       fast that this isn't too much of a problem, I think. :-)

       Computer cars don't crash into each other, and even move through each
       other.

       You can be really dull and not floor it if you want. I can't think of a
       reasonable way to fix this. Possibly remove const mode?

       There should probably be a persistent high-score table based on average
       speed, then as a tie-breaker, on distance travelled.

       There aren't any police cars, but I can't remember what they actually
       did anyway. :-(

       The high score is only for the current 'session' - quit the program,
       and bang goes the high score. This reflects how meaningful the score
       is. :-)

AUTHOR
       Russell Marks

SEE ALSO
       xtank(1x)

Version 1.0                   27rd October, 1995                     ZTRACK(6)