cycles(1)

NAME
     cycles - solo or networked multiplayer motorcycle game

SYNOPSIS
     cycles [ -i ifaddr ] [ -t ttl ]

DESCRIPTION
     You are riding your motorcycle against psychotic humans and robots.
     Avoid crashing into all bikes, trails and walls.  Points are awarded for
     excessive speed and making others crash near you or into your trail.  You
     can jump over trails and other cycles.

CONTROLS
     Use the left and right mouse buttons to turn. Hold down the middle mouse
     button to accelerate and release to decelerate.  There is no mode to keep
     your speed constant for this is an action sport and you have to be on
     your toes.  You will notice that you slow down at a greater rate than you
     accelerate. Use the Space Bar to jump, and the left and right arrow keys
     to look around you. The H-key toggles "heads-up" instructions, and the
     ESC key exits the game at any time.

PLAYING
     Upon startup, cycles provides three information pages.  The first briefly
     describes the game.  The second page is for the user to choose options
     and to change their name from the default. The third screen is a help
     page with instructions for playing. Press return or click the left mouse
     button to go from one screen to the next.

     There are three playing layers distinguished by their colours (red, green
     and blue) and the scenery upon that level.  Each player begins on a
     random level at a random position. There are holes from each level to the
     others. Simply ride over the hole of the appropriate colour to go to that
     level. However, each player sees only their own holes which move to
     another random location after either you or one of your robots have used
     them.  Hence you may be following a player who mysteriously disappears -
     never fear they have just gone down one of their own holes to another
     level.  Their trail will remain behind them upon the level they just
     left.

     Robot players are distinguished from humans by the "remote control" flags
     that are displayed upon robot bikes. Robots also tend to play better than
     most people. This may be partly because they can turn whilst in the air
     (us real players can't) but hey, they're only dumb machines and need all
     the help they can get.

     During the game, the instrument panel on your cycle shows your speed on
     the dial and your score. On the left of your instrument panel, your
     "trail kills" (see below for description of trail and near kills and the
     points they score) are displayed as black diagonal lines and your "near
     kills" are shown as red ellipses.  The colour of your instrument panel
     background is the same as your trail colour.  There is also a hexagonal
     proximity alert indicator on the right hand side, which flashes red when
     you are close to running into something.

     When in the game all players and robots are listed on the top left of the
     screen.  The name of each player is written in their trail colour. If a
     player has just been killed then their name turns white whilst they are
     exploding.  The coloured square to the left of the players name indicates
     which level (red, green or blue) they are currently riding on.  Robots
     have an "r" next to their name which is written in the colour of their
     owners trail. A + sign next to the "r" indicates a super psychotic robot.
     These + robots will actively attempt to destroy any person in their
     vicinity and will also track you across levels. Mean huh?

     If there are too many robots in the game (causing it to go slowly or to
     refuse to let real people play - see BUGS below) then you can identify
     who owns the offending robots by the colour of the "r".

     If you have used the arrow keys to look around, then the direction you
     are looking in (left, right or rear) is displayed in the top right corner
     of the screen.

     Multicast communications are used to play between different machines.
     See mrouted(1M) and COMMAND LINE OPTIONS below for information on
     multicast tunneling between machines not on the same sub-net.

OPTIONS
     These are all available from the startup options screen.

     You can choose the number of robots that run on your machine. Your robots
     are tagged with a flag the colour of your trail as well as with an "r"
     the same colour in the players display. Be aware that the greater the
     number of robots you take into the game with you, the slower the response
     of your machine will be.

     Players are by default given a random trail colour unless they choose
     their own by selecting a colour circle from the options screen. Robots
     get a random trail colour.

     A demo mode is available which lets you see a robot's eye view of the
     game. In this mode you can still look around you with the arrow keys and
     jump (so you can see better), but nothing else.

     You can choose to play solo or network mode. In network mode, two or more
     players on different machines may play each other and their respective
     robots.  Solo mode is the same as network, but you play alone with your
     robots.

SCORING AND SCORE SCREEN
     You score between 5 and 10 points per second depending on your speed.
     3000 points is awarded when someone crashes into your trail and 10,000
     points for causing someone to crash near you.

     The score screen, which is shown each time you crash, includes the total
     number of near kills and trail crashes you caused, your points for the
     game you have just played, and the total number of games. An average
     score is also displayed which is your total score divided by the number
     of games you have played.  The hardest thing to do is to keep this
     average score high.  The three level display showing the continuing
     riders and their trails, rotates serenely on your screen hiding the
     mayhem that is taking place.

SOUND
     Audio is selectable if you are running cycles on a machine that supports
     sound. Don't worry about de-selecting sound if you don't have it, as
     cycles should auto-detect whether your machine supports sound.

     Sounds are played when you explode, jump or drop to another level.  There
     are two quieter explode sounds that are played when a motorcycle explodes
     on your level or on another level.  On SGI machines there is a continuous
     engine noise sound that changes pitch as your speed changes.

     If your sound files are in an area other than the default
     /usr/demos/General_Demos/cycles/data or the current directory or the
     directory where the cycles program resides (and the program was invoked
     using it's full path), then you may set an environment variable
     CYCLESOUND that points to the directory where your .au sounds (for Sun
     and Linux machines) or .aiff sounds (for SGI machines) are kept.

     eg. if your sound files are ~/sounds/*.au, then

     setenv CYCLESOUND ~/sounds/

COMMAND LINE OPTIONS
     See also the TCP/IP User's Guide and mrouted(1M).

     -i ifaddr   select the outgoing interface address (if you have multiple
                 network interfaces)

     -t ttl      select the time to live of multicast packets (default 1).

BUGS
     There is a limit of twenty players (human plus robot) that cycles can
     hold.  If you attempt to play the game with more players, you will
     receive the message, "sorry, the game is full".

     You cannot run more than one network game of cycles from a single host
     without specifying different network interfaces (I think).

     Iconifying the window, or suspending the game causes cycles to get very
     confused.

     Trails are limited to 50 segments per bike. When all segments have been
     used up the oldest trail segments will be removed. But it'd get too
     cluttered if all the trails remained so it's not a bug it's a feature.
     Linux and Sun machines may have troubles playing several sounds at the
     same time.

AUTHORS
     Robin Humble (rjh@pixel.maths.monash.edu.au)

     Alan Lipton (alan.j.lipton@eng.monash.edu.au)

     Nick Fitton (fitton@artemis.earth.monash.edu.au)

     Sun/Linux/OpenGL port and development by rjh


CREDITS
     Sarah Maddison for artistic scenery, man page and lots of help.

     Numerous proto General Relativists and Fluid Dynamicists for suggestions
     for the next topologically unique version of cycles