Quick start
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Quick start


Play alone

First you must run the game 8-) that's to say:

Then the main menu should appear on the screen. To navigate in the menus, you'll have to use:

There's no mouse support in U61 yet.

So to play alone, just select the "Play alone" menu item by simply pressing "ENTER", and the game starts. You can control the falling blocks with the keyboard arrows.

If you don't like the key settings or their repeat rates, please keep in mind that U61 is highly customizable. Indeed the "Player options" -> "Set up player n" -> "Key settings" -> "Advanced key settings" enables you to set up different repeat rates for each key.

BTW, the "Play alone" option is here only for training since playing U61 alone does not really make any sense. You *need* to find other gamers to play with, for U61 has been designed to be a multiplayer game, and you will completely miss the fun if you only play alone.


Start local multiplayer game

This is definitely more fun than playing alone! Up to 4 players can play on a single computer, however, until I add joystick support to U61, I can't really figure out how 4 players could fit comfortably - it's possible but not really easy - on a single 102 keys keyboard.

So here's what you'll have to do:

Now whenever you see a weird black and white square, with a "?" in it, just try to make it dissappear. And see what your opponents think of it 8-) BTW, the game never ends, whenever a player looses, he restarts with an empty field. This is what some would call a "deathmatch" mode.


Start a network game

Probably the trickiest thing to do, but also one of the most powerfull features of U61. U61 offers much more than a single one-to-one network game. Currently, up to 5 computers can be connected together, and 2 players can play on each computer. So this makes a total of 10 simultaneous players...

U61 uses a client/server architecture, so a computer will act as a server, and then others will act as clients and connect to it.

If everything is OK, the client player(s) should appear on the server. Oh, BTW, the client should better hurry connecting to the server, for players on the server do not wait for the clients to start playing. This is the kind of methods used in games like Quake by ID Software for instance.

By default, U61 will use port 8061 to communicate. Many firewalls won't let IP packets pass them if one uses this port. For instance, it might be impossible to play over the internet at work, if the only connexion to the internet you have is an access with a proxy on port 80 - which is what many people have. This is not U61's fault anyway... You can also have problems if the server is started on a machine which uses network address translation (NAT). If you encounter serious problems setting up an internet game, my advice would be to first try to set up a network game on a LAN, and then when you know how to make it work locally, try and launch it over the internet again.


Configure the game

Well, I keep on saying that U61 is "highly customizable", so I guess some of you will be eager to know how to do it 8-)

There are basically 4 ways to configure U61:

How to change the theme and/or change the rules is described in other sections, so here I'll only explain how to change the options using the menus. Many settings are quite self-explanatory, so I do not detail them, but some still require some explanations. Here's a list of usefull options and what they do:


This documentation is also available on: www.ufoot.org.
Contact author: ufoot@ufoot.org