For the Silicon Graphics platform - V1.2.1 - Martin Reddy
OVERVIEW
3D Mines is a version of the famously addictive MineSweeper game
(seen played on many a PC screen) which has been specifically written
for the Silicon Graphics range of workstations. The object of the game
is simple: try to remove all of the tiles from the board without
uncovering a mine. You can try to work out where a mine is by doing a
little spot of mental arithmetic.
The game offers a number of features:
- Four levels of difficulty
- Resizeable minefield
- High Score table
- Switch Timer On/Off
- Flags for you to mark suspected mines
- Optional Debris on the mine field
- Optional Head Start
- A Pause option
- On-line documentation
- Options to change the graphics complexity to suit your machine
- And of course.. it's all in 3D! So you can rotate the board to
view it from any angle; and indeed play it from any angle.
3D Mines was written in C++ using the excellent Open Inventor toolkit.
It will run on any SGI (to the best of my knowledge) - i.e. the
binaries do not run on a PC (Windows, DOS, etc.). Both the
source code and the executables are placed in the Public Domain and
are freely-available; but I retain full copyright on all material.
DOWNLOAD THE GAME
- Click Here to download a gzipped tar
archive containing binaries for the 3D Mines V1.2.1 game (182
K). These have been compiled under IRIX 6.2 and Open Inventor V2.1,
with full optimisations. This archive also contains the on-line help
and textures for the game. This is all you need to play the game.
- Click Here to download a gzipped
tar archive containing the full C++ source code for the game
(49 K). Take a look at this if you're interested to see how I did it
all. Note: you will need the Open Inventor libraries in order to
compile the source.
WHAT'S NEW IN V1.2.1?
- Click Here to display the
Program Development History for 3D Mines and see what new
features and fixes are available in the latest version.
PLAYING THE GAME
To play the game, just download the binaries archive (above), unzip
and and untar it (e.g. gzcat Mines.tar.gz | tar -xvf -). This
will produce a directory called 3dmines. Enter the directory
(cd 3dmines) and simply type mines to run the game.
By default, 3D Mines will use a moderate amount of graphics complexity.
However, you may wish tailor the game to your own machine's capability.
There are a number of options in the Graphics menu to allow you to do this,
and these can also be set via the command line. In addition, there are
two useful command line options:
- mines -indy
- will set the lowest graphics complexity.
This is advisable if you have a base Indy machine.
- mines -reality
- will set the highest graphics complexity.
You'll probably want to do this if you have a RealityEngine or
InfiniteReality machine.
Full rules, instructions and documentation are available from within
the game itself.
Last Updated: 16 August, 1997.
Martin Reddy,
<reddy@ai.sri.com>
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