Mascot Cafe - Draft User Guide 0.1

The initial implementation of Mascot Cafe is now available for evaluation and beta test on port 3000 of timewind.duckdns.org.

Note that this is still in the experimental stages, and not all planned features have yet been implemented. Notably, the planned initial negotiation of universe parameters is not available - the combat will therefore always run with the following set up:

Maximum Number of Ships = 10
Unit time per round = 1.0, per ship = 0.1 seconds
Ships will be disconnected after 30 seconds if no command is submitted

Combat Terminates after 2 minutes if no ships communicate with the universe in that time.

To start a new game or to join a running game, the process is exactly the same., Connect your ship to port 3000 of the server and issue the usual "please please" command. Assuming that you send the correct "please please" command, you should get the following response:

Start game

This means that all is OK and you can start sending commands.

Occasionally, although your request was correct and recognised, the Mascot service cannot let you join at the current time - in this case you will get one of the following responses.

R 421 Mascot Service Unavailable
R 422 Sorry, this game is full
R 423 Too late to join this game

If you receive one of these, it's best to wait a few minutes then try again.

If you get a response like:

R 511 Protocol Error

Then it's likely that you've sent an incorrect start message.

If you get your ship to parse these responses, please just look for the R and the number part. In general, 511 is always a protocol error, and any number >= 420 and < 430 indicates that Mascot will not let you play at this time. The rest of the response is purely explanatory text which I may change without notice.

When the first ship joins the combat, expect one other ship to be present. This is a (currently) stationary drone maintained by the universe. Kill it to win the game (unless of course other ships join in before you can do so :-) ).

Caveats:

This game is defined as EXPERIMENTAL. I therefore will not be held responsible for anything which spoils your enjoyment of the game (or for anything else for that matter).

New versions of the game may be provided at short (or no) notice - I will try to avoid doing so while a game is in progress, but make no guarantees.

I'm of course interested in any bugs you find (why else put this out for beta..) but I don't guarantee to fix them in any particular timescale. When submitting a bug report, please quote the exact version of the game - get this by telnetting to port 3000

telnet timewind.duckdns.org 3000

and read what is output. You should get something like:

Connected to timewind.duckdns.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
R 511 Protocol Error - This is Mascot: CAFE Trial Build 1 Mon Sep 13 22:13:19 GMT 2004
Connection closed by foreign host.

It's the build number (in this case build 1) that I'm interested in).

Enjoy!

Trev