Antidote

Antidoters, prepare yourselves. There are whole new levels of fun with Antidote v0.3, which is now in for your block-moving and group-bashing enjoyment. Version 0.3 includes a couple of features that you, the testers, have asked for, including a configurable high-score file, key bindings for the start and pause buttons, piece preview, and a revamped scoring and speed system. The graphics have not changed much this time around, but worry not, since that is up on the list of things for the next release.

This is version 0.3 of Antidote. Changes in this version include keybindings for the start and pause buttons (s and p respectively), piece preview, a highscore file with a new end-of-game window display, and a revised scoring system weighting horizontal groups more highly than verticals. The scoring system now also correctly accounts for chain-reaction sets (killing stuff drops stuff which kills stuff, and so forth), and only speeds up the rate of the game after 15 groups are removed (not after 20 blocks have fallen). Scores on this version should in general be higher than on the previous versions, and games should also last a bit longer. There are some issues with the score file right now (the file must exist in order for any scores to be saved), and the highscore window at the end needs some cleaning, but at least it is there and operable.

This is version 0.2 of Antidote. Changes in this version include new graphics sets, the ability to configure graphics via the antidote.conf file, collapsible pieces (i.e., gravity), an actual options window (turn gravity and tileset swap on and off), working pause buttons, a fixed start button (only starts if the game is not running), a two-level quit button (pressing it while the game is running stops that game, but does not exit the program), and less problems with unreferenced items. There are still lots of things that people have recommended that aren't there yet (especially piece preview), but those will be coming later.

This is the initial release of Antidote. It is a perl script, meaning that in order to use it you need to have perl. Specifically, I've tested it with perl 5.6.1, and had a little trouble with an older 5 version, although that may have been due to other issues. You will also need the Tk module for perl, since that is the package that I have used to manage the graphics and buttons and whatnot. This has been tested on both windows95 and linux. It does not correctly display the background image in windows, for reasons that are unclear to me. Please feel free to give me feedback; my e-mail address is at the bottom of this page.

1. Download the tarball from the link above.
2. On linux systems (windows help coming later), run:
   gzip -dc antidote-x.y.tar.gz | tar xf -
   replacing x.y with the version number you downloaded.
3. To run, go into the antidote directory and run:
   perl antidote.pl