Breakout!

 Use the left and right keys (or left and right mouse buttons) to move the paddle from side to side.

You can download the source from here though you will need a base64 decoder to extract the images. You should be able to persuade Netscape (or some other browser) to extract these for you, but I'm not about to go to the trouble of maintaining them...

Hot Tips!

You can capture the ball within the bat if you move a corner of the bat towards the ball at exactly the right moment. Doing this right takes lots of practice, and usually ends up with the ball hitting the bottom of the screen. Getting the ball out can be even more interesting.

Watch out for the rubber blocks (they flash, but don't go away when you hit them) and the counter blocks (which need to be hit several times to disappear).

Performance Issues

The game runs not too badly on a SparcStation10 (a little slow, but the SS10 is a slow machine anway) and it runs better on a Pentium system running Linux (mostly due to the faster integer handling). If this game works at all on a Windows system, it is a tribute to the guys at Sun, as it is not kind to systems at all (especially with respect to colour management). I considered making the tclet allocate its own colour map, but this doesn't have much effect (sadly).

Wanted Features

  1. More kinds of brick, support for multiple balls, multiple bats, etc. i.e. general ``features''
  2. No more bugs (yes, I'm dreaming...)
  3. Sound! This would require much more work from the people at Sun, since Tcl - both plugin and non-plugin versions - doesn't support this.
  4. A fast application! This would probably require a lot of work on my part, so don't hold your breath. A Tcl compiler would help a lot here as well.
  5. Variable ball angles and speeds (spin too?) This requires vector math to do properly, but I've sort of hacked something in there...
  6. Non-rectangular images without bringing the whole app to its knees (using a mask bitmap?) This would be a good feature to have in Tcl/Tk anyway
  7. Multiple player support
  8. Better documentation on this page
Donal K. Fellows fellowsd@cs.man.ac.uk Friday, 1 Nov 1996