Snazzy Zaz is one fun puzzler

If you’re tired of the same old “match three” games, we have a fun alternative for you. In Zaz, you control a vehicle or a grabber on a predefined path, and by dragging and dropping you arrange different colored balls in triplets to make them explode and disappear. The game can be played in sequential mode, where the player proceeds through one level after another, or survival mode, where the battle is fought on a single level with more and more different balls appearing over time and the game speeding up until the player can no longer handle the pressure.

If that sounds a lot like the games Luxor, Zuma, Atlantis, and PuzzLoop, you’re on the right track. Developer Remigiusz Dybka says the name Zaz comes from “Zaz ain’t Zuma,” but gameplay differs in some important ways:

• Other games have the player rotating in place or placed on a line. In Zaz, the player is put on a path just like the balls are, which allows for greater variation between levels and occasionally really wild gameplay.
• In Zaz, the player rearranges balls on the paths instead of shooting randomly drawn balls. This allows for tricky combos and movement of bonus balls between paths.
• Zaz can have balls of different sizes (as in its Tunnel level) and, in theory, an unlimited number of paths on a single level (The Joker and Spiralis levels).

For as long as he can remember, Dybka wanted to father an open source game. “It makes me proud to be one of the hackers,” he says. A game like Zaz hadn’t been done before on Linux, he says (though the game is cross-platform), and when he came to UK from Poland last year and was struggling to find a job in the industry, the time was finally right.

Dybka uses GCC and AutoTools to build the application on Linux and MinGW with CodeBlocks on Windows. “I use GCC because I see no alternative to C/C++ when it comes to creating fast, demanding applications, and GCC is the obvious choice, while AutoTools has become a standard. To create media, I used Blender for rendering, the GIMP for everything else in graphics, and LMMS and Audacity to create sound effects.”

Zaz is currently at version 0.7, which was released this month, and is under active development. Dybka says version 1.0 will eventually include 23 different levels and internationalization on Win32 – and all known bugs resolved. He hopes to finish development by the end of summer, “so users can know that what they have in hand is a complete product and not some ongoing work in progress. I will of course support it and fix any issues that come up after that, so there will surely be versions 1.0.1, 1.0.2 …”

Dybka hopes others will one day create additional levels or level sets, or a themed version of the game with its own levels and graphics. “Those things are really easy to do. I’m not too confident with making graphics myself; I would love to see some levels done by ‘pros’.” If you want to get involved, you can contact Dybka via e-mail.

Poof, you’re a wizard, with the Dungeons and Dragons Character Generator

The dnd3rd project, also called the Dungeons and Dragons Character Generator, is a web-based application for creating characters for the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game. By using dnd3rd, players can create complete characters with just a handful of clicks, and save, reload, and upgrade characters.

Developer Jesse Smith says, “dnd3rd tries to be as friendly as possible to newcomers to Dungeons and Dragons. It tries to do as much work as possible for the player and offers (we hope) useful documentation to help with each step of the process.” A sign of the project’s success is the fact that dnd3rd has been adopted by role-playing game companies, such as Turn Watcher and SOHO Press’s The Elfish Gene.

Smith began the dnd3rd project as a way to learn more about the game. “When I first became interested in Dungeons and Dragons (3rd Edition) back around 2002, I was a bit overwhelmed by all the rules and stats. I could find only one program at the time to generate a character, and it was fairly complex and raised more questions than provided answers. So I decided the best way to learn the D&D system was to teach it – to a computer. I was learning JavaScript at the time and decided to teach myself both D&D and JavaScript at the same time. This would allow for a cross-platform, easy-to-modify script.

“From the beginning it was my plan to give away the character generator to anyone who wanted to use it. I was also aware from the start that it would be a big task and I would want help down the line. Given those criteria, it seemed like a good idea to go with an open source license. I went with the GNU GPLv2, which was the latest GPL version at the time. Originally I posted the generator on my website and gave out links to fellow gamers. After a while the traffic became too heavy for my site and I kept exceeding my bandwidth limit. That’s when I decided to move the project to SourceForge. I’ve been very happy with the decision, and SF has a lot of useful tools for tracking usage and collaborating with other developers.”

Smith says development on dnd3rd has slowed since Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition was announced. “We still get the occasional feature request and bug report, and we try to include new features as they’re requested. Right now I’d like to include some code for selecting Cleric domains and setting up more spells. Those are fairly simple but time-consuming things to do, as there is a lot of data entry involved. If anyone out there has some basic JavaScript skills and a copy of the D&D manual, I’d be happy to hear from them, and I’m happy to write letters of recommendation for people who send me useful code. I’m also glad to hear from people who would like to see features added.”

In closing, Smith offers a tip for the program’s users. “For people who want to carefully craft their characters from the ground up, I recommend creating a first-level character and then using the generator’s Level Up button. That way the player gets to assign points at each stage. Creating a high-level character right away and then assigning all the points in one go removes a bit of refinement from the process.”

Retro mail client Cone has some modern features

Cone harks back to the era when users read e-mail in a non-graphical application, without using menus, mouse, or buttons. Longtime Pine users will feel right at home with Cone; many keyboard commands are the same. However, Cone is not a Pine clone; developer Sam Varshavchik combined the general look and feel of Pine with modern advanced features.

Among the useful features Cone provides are keyboard shortcuts, Unicode support, and mail-handling macros, such as filters to move all messages with a specified subject into a separate folder.

Cone also lets you define external hooks for MIME attachments. That means you can highlight an “APPLICATION/MSWORD” attachment, press Enter, and see the attachment opened in OpenOffice.org (presuming that Cone runs in a gnome-terminal or kterm window).

Several other features provide modern security measures:

• Users can access external mail accounts through a Socks 5 proxy, and they can use an SSL certificate to log into IMAP or POP3 mail accounts instead of a traditional user ID and password.

• For SSL support Cone can be compiled against either OpenSSL or GnuTLS.

• You can encrypt multiple passwords for multiple mail accounts using a single master password, which gets supplied once per mail session to provide a Cone-specific “single sign-on” feature.

Given the robust feature set in version 0.83, which he released this month, Varshavchik says, “I consider to Cone to be feature-complete. I can’t think of anything major that’s missing, so Cone is in maintenance mode. Ongoing work is generally keeping the code from getting stale, making sure that Cone continues to be compilable by new versions of GCC, and squashing an occasional bug.

“I have a mailing list, but it gets very little traffic. I like to think that’s because most folks just install Cone, run it, and figure out intuitively how to use.”

Varshavchik admits that today, most folks use graphical desktop environments and graphical mail clients. “Graybeards who stubbornly resist evolutionary progress are probably using the Pine and Mutt mail clients. But I did not write Cone seeking fame and fortune. It was the proverbial itch I wanted to scratch, so I scratched it.”