Flight of Dragons - the Manual A game developed during the end of the summer of 1996 by: Torbjörn Nilsson and Nicklas Hjalmarsson. *Introduction This is a multiplayer game to be played across a network. The idea is to have a game server running on one machine in the network and then to have clients connect, indicating their participation. The client connections are made by an applet downloaded from an HTML page provided by us. The limit on the number of players are, at the moment, 6, although this is merely an implementational detail which could easily be increased. Everything was written in Java 1.0.2. *Goal of the Game Find the three parts of the one Talisman. These have been scattered around the land and you must find them before any of the others do, or they, and not you, will gain immortality! *Main Frame This is the frame that will show after a while when you have started the game. Top Textarea In here all kinds of events will be written for you to read. When a city or dragon has been born, it will be shown here. When you have conquered a city, it will be shown here, etc. Note that the most recent messages will be shown at the top, and as they grow older they will be scrolled downwards in this area. Middle Area This is where all the "action" takes place. On some screens you may alter the settings for your dragons or cities, and clicking in others might get you to another screen. Bottom Area In the bottom left corner you find a timer which tells you how much time you have left before the current state of the game on your client will be sent to the game server for updating. One turn equals one month in terms of the game. To the right various clickable icons are shown, representing the icon screens of the game. *Icon Screens You reach these screens by clicking one of the iconized pictures on the bottom of the frame anytime. Main Screen Be sure you know what is on this screen att all times. It will contain data about you as a player, how much money, eggs, dragons and cities you have, both in actual numbers and to some extent how well you have performed so far in the game. With money you pay your bills; dragons in your hometown eat *a lot* (on the other hand they also heal and recover from weariness faster), if you have ordered improvements to be done on any of your cities that costs too and eggs set to hatch in the egg chamber cost money depending on how much heat they get(which is controlable). You only have 20 eggs from the beginning of the game, so take care of them! If you should run out of eggs, you won't have long left to live..! Should you run out of money while you have any eggs set to hatch, these eggs will be lost! ***Your only way to get new eggs are if a visitor offers you any AND you have the amount of money he wants for them! There are also tales of magic that turns dragons into a fertile state which makes them start laying eggs. ***(NOT YET IMPLEMENTED) The number of cities you own are shown here. Many cities means more income from taxes, but beware of the uprising in each city! Should you choose to place one dragon in an area with a city you own, the city will not dare rebel whatever the tax, because of the dragon. If you move your dragon before they have calmed down however, now that's something else... After the first round you will also be able to see exactly what incomes and costs you had the previous round. Are you gaining or loosing money? Too many eggs, perhaps? It is always good to know which town is your homecity, its name it written here. You should never leave it unguarded! If you loose it, it gets conquered by another player or they rebel, well, it's game over for you! The bars which say "mana" and "mana recovery" has to do with your magical powers. Lots of mana means you can cast powerful and/or many spells. The recovery bar indicates how fast you regain your used mana. Before you can cast any spells, you have to do some research first though, inventing the spells. The bars that say "city percent" and "dragon percent" tells you how big a part of the games total amount of cities and dragons you own. Are you winning?! Remember though that this data will use your currently available map to calculate these figures, and that you may not know all the recent happenings and changes that has occured due to other players.! Map Screen This screen shows the world as you know it. In order to get updated information about happenings that include others than yourself you will have to send your dragons to get the information. This is simply done by directing a dragon to a particular interesting area. You will always have updated information about areas that you have cities in or that your dragons happens to pass through. On the map, each city will be marked with a small city icon. If the city is owned by anyone, a small banner will play in the wind with a specific colour for each player, Your homecity will be marked by a larger banner than all the others. Every dragon that you know of will be a shown as a square in the colour of the owner in the bottom of an area. When you enter this screen, a list of your dragons wil be added next to the icons on the bottom of the frame. This list will contain all your dragons and their orders. If you click ONCE on a dragon in this list, a red blinking square will appear on the map, indicating that dragon's position. If you then click anywhere on the map, you will go to the dragon quest screen. If the area you clicked on contained a city the orders will default to conquer, if there was no city the default orders will be search and if the chosen area was your homecity, the default is guard. If you click TWICE on a dragon name in the list, you will directly be shown all the dragon's current settings, in the cave screen. If you choose to click on the map without having chosen a dragon first, the next screen you will see is the area zoom screen. Dragon Cave Screen You reach this screen by clicking twice on a dragon name in the list of your dragons on the map screen. This is really the same screen as the dragon quest screen, except you don't have to click on the map (and thereby perhaps altering your previous settings for the chosen dragon) to get here. Egg Chamber Screen This is a chamber deep below your castle where you set your eggs up to hatch. At any time you may have at most 4 eggs going. If you have less, simply click on the button to add another one. For each egg you see approximately how much longer it will take before it will hatch, and for each egg you may adjust the heat. Greater heat costs more money but the dragon will hatch sooner. On the other hand such a dragon will bee quite weak. An egg that has been on low heat over a longer period of time will have had time to grow more and will therefor have superior characteristics to the fast-hacthed ones. Be careful not to use too mush heat if you don't have the money. If you should run out of money, your precious eggs will be lost! Any changes made on this screen will be registered immediately, as opposed to those made on the dragon quest screen. Magic Research Laboratory This screen contains the following objects: in the top-left corner you have a list of 6 spell schools which each one contains a number of different spells you may start to research. Just click on the school you want to have a closer look at and the spells available for you to do research on will be shown in the list to the right of the list of schools. You will only see such spells in this school that you are competent enough to deal with, so as your knowledge increases when you discover spells, new ones will appear in this list. Each spell also has a level, and the higher the level, the longer it will take for you to unveil the mysteries of this particular spell. You should also be aware of the fact that if you only do research within one school, your magic abilities will be increased in this one school only! What spells you should do research on, and what they actually do, you will not know until you have completed your research. How long it takes for a spell to be completed depends on how much money and mana you are willing to spend, you may set a monthly amount of money and mana to be used, just be careful so you don't forget them when you no longer do any research! Anyway, the more money and mana you spend, the faster you will doscover the spells you have chosen. Note also that mana is by far superior to money when it comes to inventing spells. To start doing research on a spell, you just click on it in the list, and it will be added to the right of the sceen, where it will be shown for each chosen spell how much energy you have spent on it. You energy will be evenly divided between your chosen spells, and you may NOT abandon research on any spells once you have started! Spell Casting Room As in the research laboratory you have a list of possible scholls with spells to choose from. When you do, all spells available to you (from research!) will be shown in the spell list. Click on a spell you want additional information about, and a short description will be be shown at the bottom of the screen, along with the amount of mana it will cost to cast it. If the spell you have chosen must be targeted, all possible targets are shown in the target list on the right of the screen. Click on a target and the on the button that says "Cast" to cast the spell. If you did everything right and did not forget something, a message in the message area should tell you that you cast the spell. *Sub Screens Dragon Quest Screen In this screen you will see all your dragon's characteristics, along with his current position, his mission and the goal of his mission. You can also adjust the 2 bars that say stealth and courage. The stealth bar indicates how sneaky the dragon will be. More means a lesser chance of being spotted by other dragons and forced into battle, but it also means that the speed of the dragon will be decreased. With the courage bar you tell your dragon how brave he shall be in any kind of battle, more means he will probably fight until he drops out of the sky, and less that he will flee after he has receiver his first wound. If you don't like the default settings for the mission, you can just choose another one by clicking any of the radiobuttons. Area Zoom Screen This screen shows you all the latest information you have on a particular area. You will always be shown what the terrain type is in this area. If there is a city in the area you will see bars showing its defence capabilities and technical development, as well as the size of the population and the cityname. If you should happen to own the city in this area, you will also be shown how likely the inhabitants are to rebel by the uprising bar. The tax bar shows you what taxrate you have set on this city, higher means they don't like it and the uprising will increase, lower will make them happy and the population will grow, eventually increasing the taxes collected even with the same taxrate. In your own cities you also have the chance to invest in improvements of defence or technical advances. If there are any dragons present in this are, they will be shown along with the colour of their owner and their name, so you can recognise the really old and dangerous ones..! Please note that none of the changes in this screen will be registered before you explicitly leave it. **Technical Data or How is it really managed? *What the clients does After the little timer in the bottom left corner of the screen has completed one whole lap, the client momentarily freezes the game and sends all interesting data to the game server. Then it waits for the new processed data to return, and the the timer is reset and the game continues on this client. The client also does some simple processing before and after the data is sent and returned. This processing is such that only local information is needed. *What the game server does The game server has a separate thread waiting (on the server computer) for each client to send data. When data is being received, it is collected and communicated to the game server. When the game server has been provided with data from all clients (indirect, but still...) it starts the process of moving dragons, developing and enhancing cities, growing eggs, exploring spells, casting spells, etc. The kind of processing that is being executed by the game server is such that all available data from the entire game world is needed. After all this processing has been done the data is returned to the clients, along with messages of important happenings, etc. (Note the complete world really only exists on the server. The clients only show what they know, ie the areas that have been visited by dragons or include a city owned by the player. ) *What they send to each other and why ...a lot... *Datastructures ... *What threads are running -timerthread: The timer that decides when each client shall send data to the game server. -clientthread: The main thread running on the client, cares for screen updates etc. -bannerthread: The thread that animates the banners above each city on the map screen. -serverthread: The main thread running on the server computer.