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- Battleships is an intrinsically silly game, but I couldn't resist fixing this
- sucker. It now has a purely visual interface (you place ships and call for
- shots by moving the cursor around the board using the standard yuhjklbn keys).
-
- The default game now disallows placement of ships so that they touch. A new
- -c option is available to force the older behavior.
-
- I also removed the `seemiss' option (now always on) and `ask' (which is only
- useful for cheating). And I ifdefed out the ditsy opening screen; if you want
- it back, compile with -DPENGUIN. One strike against featureitis...
-
- The code now lints as clean as the broken SysV curses lint library will let it.
-
- Some #ifdefs in the code should result in the right things being done for
- BSD or USG systems. They key off A_UNDERLINE.
-
- This was probably a waste of a day or so. But what the hack -- rewriting the
- strategy robot as an FSM was fun, and maybe the interface will set a good
- example for the next guy.
-
- <*** FLAME ON ***>
-
- People who write termcap games that require you to enter #@!!#$! coordinates
- rather than doing the natural pick-and-place with cursor motions should be
- stuffed in suits and condemned to write COBOL for the rest of their days...
-
- <*** FLAME OFF ***>
-
- O.K., I feel better now that I've got that off my chest...
-
- Eric S. Raymond
- eric@snark.uu.net
-
-