Beasts
Beast is a classic arcade-style game from the 1980's. The
original version was written by Dan Baker, Alan Brown, Mark Hamilton and
Derrick Shadel. This page describes my Java re-implementation, which
shares nothing with their's except for the graphics.
I'm hoping to use reinforcement learning to learn
beast behaviour, which will hopefully lead to more interesting
gameplay (and is far more interesting than dreaming up and implementing
heuristics!).
Please mail me if you
have any comments or suggestions.
Thanks to Fergus for help
with the grotty setgid wrapper stuff.
Play
The goal of the game is to squash all the beasts on each round of a
particular level.
World Objects
|
The player. |
|
A Light Block. Can be pushed around by the Player, and Hatched
Super Beasts. |
|
A Heavy Block. Cannot be moved, may be explosive (i.e. if the
Player contacts one, it dies, and Light Blocks pushed towards it
are destroyed.). |
|
A basic Beast - can be squashed between any two blocks. |
|
A Super Beast. Can only be squashed against a HeavyBlock.
|
|
An Egg. Hatches into a Hatched Super Beast. |
|
A Hatched Super Beast. Can push blocks around. |
Keys
- Movement: arrow keys, or the numeric keypad. Can move diagonally.
- Pull blocks: hold down shift while moving.
- Exit game: press Escape.
Applet
The applet is restricted: it does not save high scores between runs, and
does not use reinforcement learning for the beasts' behaviour.
Download
- beasts-0.1.0.tar.gz
- My implementation of BEASTS for Java (JDK1.1) including source and
class files.
- beasts_0.1.0_i386.deb
- A debian package of the above.
- beast.zip
- The original DOS implementation from the mid-1980's. The
documentation is quite interesting.
- beasts-991004.tgz
- Kevin Turner's incomplete implementation. There's a patch to go with it from Open Game
Source. (Kevin's webspace seems to have gone into that post-uni
limbo.)
To Do
- There seem to be issues with different JDKs (well, at least Sun's
JDK1.3.1 on Linux). I wrote and tested this with the IBM v1.1.8 JDK on
Linux.
- Sound.
- SuperBeast: can be preggers?
- Debian packaging. - default state file, setgid issues.
Legal mumblings
BEASTS is licenced under the GPL, with explicit permission granted to
link against the libraries it requires (viz the Java standard API, the
implementation of which need not be not GNU-free). The implementation of
the Random
class was stolen lock-stock from the
GNU
Classpath project. Be kind to it.
BEASTS.
Copyright (C) 2002 Peter Gammie (peteg42@gmail.com)
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
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Peter Gammie
Last modified: Sun Feb 22 17:44:22 CET 2004