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|____\___/_\_\\__\___|_|v1.0.3

Lexter is covered by the GNU GPL. See the file named "COPYING" in this archive for details.

General

Lexter is a real-time word puzzle. Arrange the falling letters into words to score points. Words can be formed in any direction except diagonal. Palindromes are counted twice (forwards and backwards).

Lexter supports multiple dictionaries. Letter scores and frequencies will vary with each dictionary. In addition to the characters found in the dictionary there is a "blank" character. Before the character has landed you can press a key to assign it a valid letter.

Lexter also supports internationalisation through the GNU gettext library. However, there are no translations available at the moment. Contributions are welcome.

Installation

Requirements

- Curses (ncurses works fine) - GNU Gettext (optional)

To install you can do the usual "./configure ; make ; make install", but you might not like the default configure file locations.

If GNU Gettext is installed on your system but configure cannot find it you will need to run configure differently specifying where to find the include and library files. For example:

CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib ./configure

Useful configure options:
--help

Shows some more detailed help
--datadir

Dictionaries are stored under DATADIR/lexter/. --localstatedir

Directory which will hold the lexter.scores high score file. --disable-nls

Gives a smaller binary without gettext. --with-included-gettext

Force configure to use the gettext contained in this archive. --enable-world-writeable

Use world writeable high file. The default is user/group writeable. --with-ncurses

        Force compiling under ncurses. Should only be necessary when
        configure detects a working curses but you would prefer to use
        ncurses for some reason.

For example:

./configure --bindir=/usr/local/games --datadir=/usr/local/games/lib \

--localstatedir=/var/lib/games

Lexter will attempt to create the high score file if necessary. It may fail due to permission settings in your filesystem. If so, you will need to create the high score file. For example making Lexter setgid:

chown root.games /usr/local/games/lexter chmod g+s /usr/local/games/lexter
touch /var/lib/games/lexter.scores
chown root.games /var/lib/games/lexter.scores chmod 664 /var/lib/games/lexter.scores

In Game Keys

Left/Right/Down         Move letter
Spacebar                Drop letter
P                       Pause game
H                       Show help
L                       Show letter scores & probabilities
W                       Show words found
S                       Take screenshot
Q                       Quit game

Dictionaries

The Lexter code is character set independent. Any character set dependency comes from the dictionary being used. The dictionaries in this package use the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set:

en      ASCII           (A subset of ISO 8859-1, and many other charsets)
fr      ISO 8859-1

The dictionary character set should match your terminal character set, otherwise your games are going be very weird. The "en" dictionary should work just about everywhere. If you're not sure what character set you are using just try a dictionary, it'll be pretty obvious if it doesn't match.

You can drop your own dictionary into the lexter dictionary directory and use that. Lexter looks for a dictionary by the name of your 2 letter language code first (en, fr, ru, etc..). You can use "-d" to specify a dictionary named differently. The dictionary should only contain line feeds (\n) and words. Everything other than the line feeds is considered a valid character for the game. Standard Unix text files are fine, but DOS text files will cause problems.

If you make your own dictionary make sure you strip out the smaller "words". Removing single character "words" is required since they will always match. Also remove any words containing capitals. ASCII captital letters are used by the game which stops them from updating any falling blank letters.

The dictionaries in this package only include words between 4-10 letters long, even though there is no limitation in the game code.

Dictionaries aren't limited to your language. You can have whatever words/characters you like. They could be topical like place names or even famous number sequences. It might make for a very difficult game ;).

Feedback

Lexter needs some play testing. Some areas that may need tweaking: - letter probabilities
- speed of play and speed increases
- pit size
- game length

GNU Gettext translations to other languages are welcome. Feel free to email me with any comments or suggestions.

Mark Pulford
<mark@kyne.com.au>