Starship Soccer

Version 0.94a - 29 December 1999

Copyright 1997-1999 Simon P. Bullen - simonbullen@yahoo.com
http://www.oocities.org/simonbullen


 

Contents

  1. Copyright
  2. Credits
  3. Contacting the Author
  4. Introduction
  5. System Requirements
  6. Porting
  7. To Do
  8. Revision History
  9. Internet Resources
  10. The Rules of Starship Soccer
  11. Team Development
  12. The Physics of Starship Soccer
  13. User Team C++ Reference
  14. Universal constant reference
  15. Rating System
  16. Command Line Parameters
  17. Screen Saver configuration
  18. Keyboard controls
  19. Troubleshooting

Copyright

Starship Soccer is Copyright ©1997-1999 Simon P. Bullen.
It may be freely distributed, with the condition that no more than a nominal fee is charged for media.
Everything in this distribution must be kept together, in original, unmodified form.
The material is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind.
This software may not be used for the construction, development, production, testing, or use of weapon systems of any kind.

Credits

Starship Soccer was designed, programmed and documented by Simon P. Bullen.
Vector fonts designed by Nick King.
Additional Win32 programming by Ben Michell and Jason Williams.
Noise3 and turbulence functions by Ken Perlin. Thanks Ken!
Catering provided by Greasy Joe's, St Kilda.
Testing and design feedback: Ben Michell, Jason Williams, Rob Welsh

Contacting the Author

web: http://www.oocities.org/simonbullen
e-mail: simonbullen@yahoo.com

Snail:
Simon P. Bullen
PO BOX 12138 A'Beckett St
Melbourne 3000
Australia
 

Introduction

In the tradition of "Planetary Pool", Starship Soccer is a game of spacecraft and geometry.
In the tradition of C-robots and Core Wars, Starship Soccer provides an environment in which algorithms can compete directly against each other for the amusement of humans.
Opposing teams of 2 dimensional starships thrust around a zero gravity, low friction arena attempting to score goals in a fast paced, dynamic and explosive sport from the future.

Starship Soccer is intended as a programmer's game. It makes a good spectator sport, and you can even play manually -- but the real challenge of Starship Soccer is to write your own team, then watch it compete against teams written by others.

The level of programming required is minimal -- Starship Soccer takes care of running the game world. The user teams only need to control the ships.
Documented source code to a sample team has been provided to help get you started.

System Requirements

Porting

The game engine has been written in portable C++.
It will run on other platforms given an appropriate display driver implementation.
Teams can be directly compiled into the engine as an alternative to a DLL.
The scripting language may change to Java at some point to allow platform independent team implementations.
 

To Do

This is an alpha release!
Here's the list of things I haven't done yet.

Planned for Version 0.95a:

Planned for Version 1.00:

Somewhere in the distant future, maybe:

Revision History

Version 0.94a - 29 December 1999

Version 0.93a - 22 October 1999

Version 0.92a - 23 September 1999

Version 0.90a - 31 July 1999

Internet Resources

Starship Soccer has an eGroup for the team writer community.
It is a space on the net where team developers can discuss tactics and techniques, announce new teams and run competitions.
Updates to the Starship Soccer engine itself are also announced to this list.
If you're looking for teams to download, or somewhere to upload -- come here.

Subscribe to Starship Soccer
Enter your e-mail address: 
starship-soccer archive
An e-group hosted by eGroups.com

The Rules of Starship Soccer

The classic Starship Soccer Arena is a rectangle, 280m by 200m.
It is walled by a reflective force field; objects that collide with the field will bounce like a pool ball off a cushion.

The players are starships, with very simple controls: turn left, turn right, thrust, and fire (yes, you can thrust while turning and firing).

Two teams of three starships compete to score goals in a 2 minute game.

The ball and goals are free moving objects that can be bounced and pushed.
Bounce the ball into the goal, or the goal into the ball, and your team scores a point.

When the ball bounces off a wall it is displayed with a double hex.
If a goal is scored while the ball is a double hex, two points are scored instead of one.
The double hex will remain active until the ball has collided with another object.

Once a goal has been scored, the ball becomes "dead".
While dead, the ball will not score points if it collides with a goal.
To help the ball escape the vicinity of the goals before play resumes, it shrinks to half its normal size and accelerates in the direction it is already moving.
When the ball is far enough away from both goals, it will then return to normal and play may continue.

This continues until the game time runs out.
If the two scores are even when the time runs out, then the game goes into Extra-Time.

During Extra-Time, the explosions from bullets destroy starships. Note that the launch time of the bullet is not relevant - bullets launched before extra time are still deadly if they explode during Extra-Time.
Shooting a ship scores one point (to the dead ship's opposition). Bouncing a bullet off a wall into a ship scores two points.
Goals can be scored in the normal manner during Extra-Time.

Extra-Time continues until one team has been completely destroyed, or the time limit runs out.
Thus it is still possible for a draw, but it should be rare.

Rating System

The teams in Starship Soccer are ranked by a self balancing rating system.

Each new team is given 100 points.
When a team plays it bets 5% of its current rating.
The winner of the match receives the bet made by the other team. If there is a draw, each team gives their bet to the other team.
The higher the rating, the stronger the team. The stronger the team, the bigger the reward for defeating it.

Starship Soccer displays the rating along with other statistics for each team between games.

The goal rate is "the number of goals scored for each goal scored against you".
 

Command Line Parameters

Specifying Team DLLs

Starship Soccer accepts 1 or 2 wild card patterns for team DLLs to load. If one pattern is provided, the teams found will play on the left and the right sides of the screen. If two patterns are provided, the DLLs that match the first pattern will play on the left; the DLLs that match the second will play on the right. You may specify the same DLLs in each pattern.

For example:
        StarshipSoccer teams\s*.dll teams\*.dll - DLLs that start with s will play on the left. All DLLs will play on the right.

Configurable Constants

Specifying -constant filename on the command line will cause Starship Soccer to use the universal constant from the named files, instead of the built-in default (Classic). Wildcard patterns can also be used.

For example:
        StarshipSoccer -constant constants\*.ssc

Debug Mode

Normally if a team crashes, Starship Soccer will flat-line it. If you are trying to debug a crashing team, you may need to specify "-debug" on the Starship Soccer command line to disable its exception handling. This should allow the debugger to trap the crash in your DLL.

This mode also turns on debug lines for both teams.

Fullscreen Mode

F12 and 2 both toggle the fullscreen mode. By default the program starts in a maximized window.
Specify -fullscreen on the command line to start in fullscreen mode.

Mirror Matches

A game where a team plays against itself is called a "Mirror Match". (e.g. Sample vs Sample)
You can learn a lot about a team by watching how it plays against itself, but this type of match does not affect the ratings system.
They are disabled by default, and can be enabled with "-allowMirrorMatch".
Note: Mirror matches can still happen if there is only one team loaded on a side (and that team is also loaded on the other side).

Random Seed

The seed used to initialize the random number generator is normally the system clock.
You can specify a value on the command line if you wish to be able to play "the same game" over and over again.
This can be useful for debugging and tweaking your team.
Note that the seed does not effect the team selection process -- only the inital locations of the objects.

Example Usage:

    StarshipSoccer -seed 47

Batch mode

Specifying -batch on the command line causes Starship Soccer to run in "fast-foward" mode. This mode can be toggled by pressing '5' in the non-screen saver version.
 

Screen Saver configuration

The screen-saver is installed into your Windows directory so that Control Panel can find it.
It currently reads its command line from the registry, and will write its default setting there if none is found.
The registry value supports the same command line format as the interactive StarshipSoccer.exe.
Debug mode does not disable exception handling in the Screen-saver, but it does turn on the debug lines for both teams.

For example:
        [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Continental Laboratories\Starship Soccer\ScreenSaver]
        "CommandLine"="Teams\\*.DLL -constant constants\deathmatch.ssc"

Keyboard controls

 
Category Action Keys
Manual 
Ship 
Controls		 Manual On. Home
Manual Off. End
Next ship. Page Down, or X
Previous ship. Page Up, or Z
Fire. Control, or Cursor-Up
Thrust. Cursor Down
Left. Cursor-Left
Right. Cursor-Right
Team 
Debugging 
Controls		 Toggle left team debug lines. Insert
Toggle right team debug line. Delete
Toggle left team AI. Not yet available.
Toggle right team AI. Not yet available.
Game
Management
Controls		 Exit program. Esc
Extend current screen.  Hold Shift
Skip current screen. Space
Quit current screen. Same as
Skip except it also works for
the game and Extra-Time.		 Q
Toggle fullscreen display F12 or 2
Features
in
Development		 Toggle mouse-ball mode 3
Toggle debug background 4
Toggle super-fast-forward 5
Toggle slow-motion 6
Toggle pause Pause

Troubleshooting

Problem: Game appears jerky
Solution: Reduce the size of the Starship Soccer window, the resolution of your screen, and switch to a 16-bit display mode.