So what do you do when you want to write a multiplayer, action-based game that you and your student friends can fire up and enjoy from anywhere? You create a terminal-based game that uses shared memory on the departmental UNIX machine, of course.
And so there became Hunt. It started out as an exercise in learning how to use shared memory and coordinate concurrent tasks (our current 3rd year subjects), and turned into a fun game that consumed many playing hours.
Here is the obligatory screenshot.
Hunt singlehandedly destroyed comp. science tutorial classes when the first- and second- year students discovered it. The similarities in gameplay to its modern counterpart - counterstrike - are, well, striking.
This was a game for up to four players, on a shared map that supported wall damaging (the walls marked with * could be destroyed, walls marked with # were permanent), equipped the player with a gun, some bullets, a few grenades and a knife. These are still the standard fare as used by Counterstrike.
Players could see via line-of-sight where their enemies were hiding - in the screenshot you can see the cursor highlighting the player, and another player (player 1) just to the left. While other players were displayed simply as their player number 1 thru 4, your were shown differently - as one of the symbols < ^ > V to indicate which way you were facing. Actions like firing the gun or throwing grenades depended on this direction. Changing direction also consumed a move, so strafing became an important strategy.
There was a time limit on the game, set to 5 minutes by default. Eerily, this is the same default time limit that counterstrike sets on each round.
Hunt did not allow the player to purchase weapons or armor. Everyone started out with the same equipment, and it became a frantic race to frag the others as fast as possible before the time ran out. If you were killed then you simply respawned elsewhere in the map with your remaining equipment and 10% deducted from your score.
The current downloadable source compiles and runs on prtty much any modern Linux system, but no guarantees. It runs just fine on my RedHat 6.0 based machine, which has bits of later releases added on. There is a precompiled binary in there just in case you can't compile it yourself.
The original man page is here for more info.
cheers, Anthony
