Be The Wumpus

  • Downloads
  • Compiling
  • Running the game
  • Screenshots
  • Controls
  • Man page
  • Bugs

    • Be The Wumpus is a game with no graphics, with no text, only audio. You are a wumpus, a blind, cave dwelling creature who subsists on meals of unlucky cave wanderers. Back in the 70's, you may have been among those brave souls who hunted the wumpus. But the wumpus, driven nearly to extinction, is now a protected species. But, do not fear, there is still much fun to be had involving both hunting, and wumpusses. Now you can be the wumpus, and hunt the wumpus hunters!

    This game is licensed under the good old GPL v. 2.0, except for the audio files, which are licensed under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license. (see sounds/Attribution.txt).

    WARNING -- this game does contain small amounts of sounds of people speaking words which some people might consider profane. If you are apt to be offended by the numbers in a .wav file when run through a D/A converter, and then the analog signal amplified then run through a loudspeaker of some kind, well, you may have a problem with my numbers then, I suppose. Thing is, it's your problem, not mine. You've been warned. And what sorts of things would you expect people trapped in a dark cave with a hungry wumpus to say?

    If you don't like it, well, that's just too damned bad.

    Screenshots

    Downloads

    Download bethewumpus-0.03.tar.gz, current as of Apr 7, 2008.

    You may be able to get a more up to date version via CVS. To download from CVS, do the following at the shell prompt: 

    	cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@bethewumpus.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/bethewumpus login

	cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@bethewumpus.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/bethewumpus co -P bethewumpus

    	cd bethewumpus
	make

    Compiling the game

    Compiling is easy, after checking out from CVS as above, just type "make." You'll need the gnome libraries and header files, which you likely already have.

    You may need to set a couple environment variables: 

    export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

    (I have that in my ~/.login, so I tend to forget about them.)

    You'll also need libsndfile and the portaudio libraries, which there's a good chance you don't already have. These are easily compiled and installed via the traditional "./configure", "make", and (as root) "make install" commands. You need version 19 of portaudio, not 18. portaudio v. 18 is several years old, and the API has changed. I think debian may have version 18 of portaudio as the default, as I have gotten some complaints about this from debian users.

    You also needs oggdec (from the vorbis-tools package) to decode the .ogg files to .wav files.

    Other packages you might need:

    • gtk2-devel
    • pango-devel
    • atk-devel
    • vorbis-tools (for oggdec)

    Running the game Type 

    ./bethewumpus
    in the directory you built it (because it expects the sound files in a "sounds" subdirectory).

    Controls

    This game is best played with a controller with two joysticks, such as the Logitech Dual Action 2 Rumble. (The rumble function doesn't work with linux at the moment.) Headphones are highly recommended, and to really get anything out of the game, headphones not just recommeded, but mandatory.

    If you do not have a joystick, you can play with the keyboard, arrow keys + space bar to chomp, but it sucks. Gamepads aren't too expensive, consider buying one.

    • The left stick controls rotation.
    • The right stick controls forward and backward motion.
    • The first button makes the wumpus attack. You must be within close range of your prospective meal for this to be effective, otherwise you simply frighten the meal.

    Bugs

    There are some probably some bugs.

    I have noticed that sometimes, in v. 0.02, you cannot attack. The game tries to only allow one "wumpus roar" sound play at a time, so you can't attack while the wumpus roar sound is still playing from the previous attack. Somehow the variable which tracks this gets out of sync, or overwritten, and you are prevented from attacking at all. From what I've seen, this happens at the beginning of the game, just running the game again may allow you to pass this. I haven't tracked this bug down yet, but it is the first thing on my list of things to fix when I get some time and motivation to work on this.

    Update, Mar 31:Sean Bolton sent me a patch which fixes this problem (thanks Sean). The fix is now in CVS.

    Update, Apr 5:The above bug is fixed in v. 0.03.

    Acknowledgements

    This game is obviously inspired by In the Pit by Studio Hunty. I have never played "In the Pit", as I don't have a Windows machine, nor a wired xbox controller which that game requires. "Be The Wumpus" is almost certainly an inferior version of "In the Pit", but after reading about In the Pit, then much later getting a Logitech Dual Action Rumble joystick, or whatever it's called, and mistakenly thinking the rumble might be made to work (after reading Documentation/input/ff.txt in the linux kernel), it seemed an interesting project to make a game based on the description of "In the Pit." I figured I'd have more fun programming "Be the Wumpus" than I would playing it (or playing In the Pit, if I could) and learn more as well. And so I have.

    Anyway, I would like to acknowledge Studio Hunty for the very interesting idea.