K  K    OOO   TTTTT   H  H
                  K K    O   O    T     H  H
                  KK ing O   O f  T he  HHHH ill
                  K K    O   O    T     H  H
                  K  K    OOO     T     H  H 

[ Story ] 

Each one is a battle-hardened warrior, that is all we really know.  Do
they have a past?  Certainly.  Perhaps one was on the front lines of
the South American affair.  Maybe another fought in China, when the
bombs fell.  Certainly a few saw the trenches during the Montana
cessation, or the French uprising, or the battle for Australia.  They
are veterans of countless battles, fine tuned war machines prepared to
lay their lives for whatever cause.

Unfortunately, they are no longer needed.

As the new world order came about, the soldiers of the world's nations
(those that survived) became useless.  A burden at best, a danger at
worst.  But these men and women, highly trained to destroy, could not
re-integrate into society.  They became a class apart - veritable
outcasts.  But in the new world, everyone had to have a purpose, and
soon, a purpose came: entertainment.  The world's population, now
denied the ability to express their violent urges, needed a vent:
blood sport.

It was all very simple, really.  The war machines of the lesser years
still haunted the lands, there was simply too much to get rid of all
at once.  Stock piles of weapons were collected, and an area of the
American Midwest (known in the dark days as "Nevada" "Utah" and "New
Mexico") was reserved for The Game.  Through camera set up in bunkers
and satellites, the rest of the world looked on.

What is The Game?  Take some soldiers.  Put them in a vehicles, load
them with weaponry, and send them out into the desert.  The last one
remaining is a hero, and will spend the rest of his or her life in
comfort.  The rest...  Well, they had nothing to live for anyhow.

The Game became popular - very, very popular.  Ex-soldiers found
themselves in very high demand, and a number of "recruiting agencies"
sprang up to provide a continuous supply of new cannon fodder.
The "players" now fly the recruiter's colors, and everyone has their
favorite.  Maybe it is the bright green flag of the Sherman-Hess
Combine, who claim to have the best pre-combat training of any, or
perhaps the muted brown flag of Apocalypse Incorporated, with an
incredible seven champions to its name. The next best, flying a
distinctive red flag, is the Confederated Brothers of Flame.  They
have only four.

The Game is a major business now, followed as it is by fully
two-thirds of the world's population.  This means money.  Winners are
handsomely rewarded, and of course their agencies take a cut.  A very
large cut.  The agencies also bear the cost of the losers, knowing
that just one champion means years of profits, but nevertheless many
people die.  Some say the pilots are no longer needed, that everything
is done by remote control.  The agencies deny this vicious rumor, and
nevertheless pilots are celebrities in their own right.  There are
those who try to press the issue - some disappear.

Such is the state of the world.


[ The Game ] 

King of the Hill, KOTH, is an artillery game in the grand old
tradition of little tanks with ridiculously powerful weapons trying to
blow each other up while trying to avoid getting blown up themselves.
The story above is just one possible justification for why a bunch of
tanks would be up in the mountains shooting at each other.  Feel free
to make up your own, or simply enjoy the game.

Perhaps at this point you may be thinking, "yea, yea, another stupid
wannabe clone of the Gh0d of these sorts of games, Scorched Earth" but
wait - KOTH has a major feature that no other (free) game of this
genre I know of has: fully networked multiplayer.

KOTH is based on a client-server networking model.  Players can join
and leave at any time, and because bandwidth use is quite modest you
can even easily play over a modem - KOTH really is a strategy game,
pingtime is irrelevant.

other features include:

* uses LibGGI for portable graphics
* Can chat with other players at any time
* Can purchase a variety of cool weaponry
* terrain generation via fractal tessellation
* free software so anyone can extend KOTH to add new weapons etc


[ Installation ]

KOTH uses automake and autoconf.  It will poke around your system and
hopefully verify you have everything you need to build KOTH.

to build, just type:

$ ./configure
(stuff happens)
$ make
(stuff compiles)

and you will have two binaries, src/koth and src/koths.  The client
program is "koth", the server is "koths" (sorry about the similarity
of the names, the convention is from xpilot/xpilots).

At this point you can type "make install" and koth/koths will probably
get stuck in /usr/local/bin.  All the images koth uses are either
compiled in or generated on the fly, so it has no dependencies on
external files.  For this reason the location of each program is
basically irrelevant.  Feel free to run it out of the source tree,
that's what I do :)


[ Getting Started Quickly ]

Run "koths".  Join the game with "koth".  Go to a console and run a
few AIs, either kmoron-ai (fires randomly), or kclever-ai (fires
intelligently).  Careful, if you start up more than one AI before you
join the game they might start playing without you!

[ Options ]

There is a config file koth.cfg.  It is searched for in the current
directory, if not found, it will look for the global config in
/etc/koth/koth.cfg.

To get a list of command line options, run whichever program with the
-h parameter.

[ Playing ]

Gameplay is fairly simple.  There are basically three modes, called
pregame, in game, and postgame.


[ Pregame ]

In pregame you can chat with other players, and buy weapons.  The
following keys do things:

Up/Down         - moves the weapon-buying menu
Right           - buys weapons
Alt r           - toggles your ready state
Alt o		- toggles observer
Alt q           - quits the game
Alt h           - prints out these keys
Alt n           - changes your name to whatever is in the input area
everything else - types a message for the chat area, Enter sends.

The game cannot start until all players have indicated that they are
ready to play.  This does not include observers, however.  When
everyone is ready. the real game starts.


[ In Game ]

The first thing that happens is that tanks will get placed, then the
new terrain will get downloaded and drawn across the screen.  Then,
the game starts.  There are two possible firing modes, which is set by
the server, either take-turns mode, or simultaneous mode.  In
take-turns mode, each player gets a chance to fire off a shot, going
around in order.  In simultaneous mode, each player registers a shot,
and when every player has set one all are fired simultaneously.  The
server is in simultaneous mode by default, so if things are not
shooting make sure everyone actually hit return to fire a shot :)

The following keys do things:

Up/Down    - change shell muzzle velocity
Left/Right - change barrel angle
Return     - fires
-/+        - goes to next/previous weapon in inventory
Space      - goes to the next weapon in inventory
Alt r          - resynchronizes with the server
Alt q          - quits game entirely
t          - enters "message mode" - you can type a message to 
             everyone else in a message box at the bottom of 
             the screen.
Escape (message mode only) - cancels current message
everything else - types a message when in message mode, return sends,
                  nothing otherwise

[ Development, feedback ]

KOTH is still in heavy development in spots, but I think it has enough
pieces to show what this game will really be able to do, and I'm
hoping that a few people off the Internet will choose to help make
this game a classic today that Scorched Earth and other artillery
games are classics of the DOS era.

Coders:  look at doc/hackinginfo.txt for source-browsing tips.  
I've gone to some lengths to make the code accessible, so it shouldn't
be too hard to jump right in.

There is now a mailing list for KOTH-related discussion.
Visit http://savannah.nongnu.org/mail/?group=koth for instructions.

[ End Notes ]

As will quickly be obvious to anyone who has played the DOS game
"Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games" KOTH borrows heavily from
it.  In fact, I originally approached the current maintainer of scorch
to see about a Linux port (as free software and not shareware).  I was
refused on the grounds (besides the fact that the original author
didn't want anyone else besides the current maintainer to handle it)
that it was 107666 lines of hairy C++.  The present maintainer replied
that he was going though too much pain trying to port it to native
Win32 and there was no new supported version in sight, let alone ports
to other platform.  With that clear and resounding no, I decided it was
time to show the power of free software.

So during Winter break of 1998-1999 I started work. I worked about a
week straight on basic architecture, then classes started again.
During the semester I was too busy to work on it most of the time,
getting a little work in during spring break.  This summer of 1999 I
have advanced the game to the first version worth releasing, and so I
am bestowing it to the free software community to enjoy and hopefully
help out on.

The story is somewhat inspired by the settings of the movies "Robot
Jox" and "The Running Man".  It is deliberately vague, since the
purpose of this documentation is to make playing the game a more
enjoyable experience; I expect your imagination can fill in the gaps
better than if I were to sit here and write a novel just to support
this game :)

Peter Amstutz
tetron@student.umass.edu
3:54pm 2 September 1999