LETTERS(6) UNIX Programmer's Manual LETTERS(6) NAME letters - a game to improve typing skills SYNOPSIS letters [-q | -b] [-l#] [-H#] [-ddictionary | -sstring] letters [-h] DESCRIPTION Letters is based on Letter Invaders which was around in the PC environment several years ago. It in turn was based on the popular arcade style game, Space Invaders. For those not familiar with Space Invaders (please let me know if you're one of these people and let me know what planet you've been living on :-) the idea is to blast aliens out of the sky as they attempt to land on and "kill" you. Since this is a game to improve typing skills, the aliens are words selected randomly from the dictionary. You blast the aliens out of the sky by typing them correctly. Playing the game is very straight forward. Type words as they appear on the screen. They will slowly drop until you have either typed them correctly or they reach the status line on the bottom of the screen. If a word makes it to the bottom of the screen you lose one "life". This is actually a non-violent game. The words "kill" and "life" are only used in this context for historical reasons. If at any point you type a letter incorrectly the entire word is reset. The backspace key will not save you if you're a sloppy typist. It is not necessary to type words in the order they appear on the screen. In fact, that is often not the best action to take. Very short words fall faster than longer ones. The program will attempt to determine the word you are trying to type by matching what you've typed with the first letter(s) of all other words on the screen. Unlike in previous versions the program tries to determine what word you are typing by more than the first letter. The highlight bar doesn't move to a new word until it is clear which word is being typed. If you successfully complete 3 rounds of play you get a bonus life and you get the opportunity to play a bonus round. The bonus round is played the same as all other rounds but the words are strings of random printable charac- ters. The round is played at the same speed as whatever level you were on and likewise points are computed the same as in that round. since this is just a bonus round, you can only gain points. You cannot die. The round lasts as long as all other rounds (15 words) unless a word reaches the bottom of the screen. Special Keys Printed 7/6/92 23 SEPT 1991 1 LETTERS(6) UNIX Programmer's Manual LETTERS(6) ctrl-L Redraw screen. ctrl-C Exit from the game. You will be prompted before exiting to make sure that's really what you wanted to do. Since it prompts you this can also be used as a method of pausing the game. This is actually whatever your interrupt character is. Ctrl-C is just most common. ctrl-N Skip to next level. The game does correctly keep track of how many levels you have completed. (See '-l' under OPTIONS) ctrl-Z Works as it should. If your system has job control it will stop the process. OPTIONS -q quiet mode (default) - turn off the obnoxious beep -h Show high scores. -b Beep when words are completed or mistyped. -l# # is the level number that you want to start at. The level will not increase until you have completed the number of rounds equal to your starting level. In other words, if you start on level 5, you need to play through 5 rounds before the level increases to 6 (and the speed increases and scoring changes). -H# # is a handicap applied to the speed that the words fall. By default the handicap is 1. This is really only useful for someone just learning to type that need the words to fall slower than they normally do on level 1. Since the speed is reduced drastically by higher handicaps, scores obtained with a handicap greater than 1 are not saved to the high score list. -ddictionary Dictionary is the pathname of an alternate source of randomly selected target words. Useful for alternate spellings or special typing exer- cise wordlists. Scores obtained will not effect the high score file. -sstring String is a character string from which randomly generated words will be chosen. Characters are copied in order, wrapping around from the end of the string to the beginning. Bonus words are constructed from characters chosen from the string in random order. Useful for exercises based around small sets of type- writer keys, such as the home row. High scores will not be saved to the high score list. Printed 7/6/92 23 SEPT 1991 2 LETTERS(6) UNIX Programmer's Manual LETTERS(6) SCORING A word's point value = (# of letters) + 2 * (current level). No points are added for partially typed words. Successful completion of bonus rounds increases your score by 10 * level. STATUS LINE It's fairly obvious what most of the things on the status line are. The last thing on the line however is words per minute. This is computed at the end of each round based on 5 letter words. It's not a particularly accurate measure of your typing speed, but I think it's an interesting enough statistic to justify filling up the empty space on the status line. FILES /usr/dict/words /mit/games/src/letters/scores/letters.high BUGS "Transmogrifier" doesn't appear frequently. AUTHORS Larry Moss (lm03_cif@uhura.cc.rochester.edu) - original game, UNIX version Brent Nordquist (brent@limabean.veggard.mn.org) - amiga ver- sion, also fixed some of bugs. THANKS Chris Uppal (chrisu@sco.com) for contributing enormously to the program with a couple of bug fixes, variable speed words, some performance improvements, SYSV compatibility, and many suggestions. Brad Keister (keister@poincare.phys.cmu.edu. Ported it to MS-DOS and added the -H option. Adrian Godwin (agodwin@acorn.co.uk). Ported it to system Vr2. Added the -s and -d options. Mark Levinson (mrle_cif@uhura.cc.rochester.edu) for pointing out the bug listed above. Thanks also to everyone else that's sent me mail with com- ments and/or suggestions. Printed 7/6/92 23 SEPT 1991 3