Crack Attack!
Advanced Features

Personal Garbage Image

Crack Attack! is fully customizable!

That is a big lie. However, you can get it to use your own personal giant garbage image. Often, whenever you lay a really serious piece of garbage down on your opponent, it will have some sort of inspirational message on it. Normally, Crack Attack! chooses an image at random from its little stock pile. However, if you specify your own personal image, Crack Attack! will use it more often than not. During online play your image will be placed on any giant pieces of garbage which fall on your opponent. With solo play the image will be used on garbage you send to yourself. Just think of the possibilities! You can communicate your views on your opponent's intelligence, at the same time as you play a rousing game of Crack Attack! You could propose to your girlfriend, assuming she's enough of a loser to play Crack Attack! The list goes on.

A personal garbage image must be 128x128 or smaller. Save the image as an uncompressed TGA with alpha channel. Name the image file garbage_flavor_my.tga. If you are running Linux, put the file in the directory .crack-attack/ which is located in your home directory. If you are running Windows, put the file in the directory localdata which is located in Crack Attack!'s application directory. Remember, do NOT use RLE compression when saving. Why? Because I'm too lazy to code up an uncompressor but too proud to use someone else's. Plus, your hard drive is huge. If you're really hard up for space, maybe you could delete a few of those LEXX episodes. When creating a personal garbage image, use a transparent background and keep in mind that that transparent background will become red once the image is placed on the garbage.

As you play against a multitude of opponents, Crack Attack! will accumulate a set of garbage images and will use them from time to time. If you manage to obtain a garbage image which is of particularly bad taste and you'd like to be rid of it, find its file. Under Linux it will be found in the directory .crack-attack/ located in your home directory. Under Windows it will be found in the directory localdata located in Crack Attack!'s application directory. The file will be among the files named garbage_flavor_###.tga. Simply delete it.

Needed Improvements

Potential Improvements

Believe it or not, there are improvements which could be made to Crack Attack!. In addition to some of the things listed below, you can find a more constantly updated list on the Tasks page at Savannah.

Improved Socket Code

Currently the networking code base is being ported to ENet to give offset the work of actually maintaining the networking layer and just getting a better Crack Attack!.

Triangle Strips

I'm lazy and thus never got around to triangle stripping the basic block. As itis the block has over five hundred vertices. That's almost embarrassing.

Sound

Mike Frysinger has ported Miguel Ãngel Vilela GarcÃ­a's sound patches to the current CVS and it's being tested. We're looking for some good sounds. Anybody up to the challenge?

Documentation

There currently isn't any good documentation covering the way to use the sound and music patches. There also aren't any guides explaining the computer players. We also don't have a very complete man page.

Money

This would be nice, but we college students see money as a pipe dream.

Website

I'm not much of a layout person, and I'm bad at keeping web pages up-to-date. Anybody want to keep track of this?

Thanks to...

Kevin Webb, for being the best player I have ever seen.

GNU General Public License

Copyright (C) 2002 Daniel Richard Nelson

Copyright (C) 2004 Andrew Sayman

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

The GNU General Public License can be found online at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html. Additionally, a copy can be obtained by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

Disclaimer

It is important to realize that the name of Crack Attack! X-treme play mode is meant to be humorous, and thus should not itself be the subject of derision. Thank you.