LaWord 1.01 by Larry Anderson LaWord is a word guessing game written in WcCode 5.0. The rules of the game simple, and can create some very fun, educational and competitive games. Basically the computer will select 5 words out of the 213,000+ words. You guess letters trying to fill in the blanks. When you think you know a word, you press the number of the word and enter your guess. You lose points if you incorrectly guess the word, but you gain additional points for guessing the word early. After you complete the game, the words you had, along with your name and your score are saved. Other users can then go and challenge to beat your score. The winner is tabulated at the end of the game and each users records are updated automatically. Wins and losses, along with the high score for each user is tabulated in a monthly file. The program automatically creates all the new files each month, while keeping the previous months intact and allows the users to view the previous scores. Winning and losing streaks are also kept track of along with personal high scores and personal low scores. Installation Installation is a breeze. Create a directory anywhere you like. Call it anything you like also. Unzip all the files in this directory and then copy the LaWord32.wcx file to your Wildcat directory. Add the program to your menu programs and place the location of the data files for my program in the parameter section of WcMenu. Run the Install.bat program located in my archive from the installation directory. This will create some sub folders named: Chall, Players and Scores. That is all there is to it. All the score files will be created automatically when entering the program for the first time. The Words This word list, is, as I have been told, is an official word list of acceptable words for the game of Scrabble(tm). Some of the words are very, shall we say controversal. A lot of users have said that the words are not words. This list contains over 213,000 words and makes a very tough game indeed. You can delete any words in the list, and add any words to the list also. You can even use your own list of words if you want to. To add or remove or even use a different word list, just follow the following rules: The word list MUST be called ??????.LST After a word is deleted or added or a new word list is copied over, you MUST delete the file called WORD.NO This file contains the number of words in the word list and is created automatically when the program is ran and that file does not exist. The program also creates a file called ?????1.IDX, which is an index of the words. Another file is created called ?????2.IDX and this file is an index of the index of the words. Confused you? Good, just run the program and it will take care of itself. Another file will also be created with the extender of TXT. This files contains a one line text description of the word/phrase list. *** NEW!! Phrases! Phrases can also be used, as long as they are not greater than 37 characters in length. If they are there, you will not get an error, they just simply will not be picked. A default list of Phrases is contained in the archieve titled Phrases.lst. Copy this file over to the Words folder and enter the program and pick phrase as your word list and the index will be created. The Game To play the game, the users just guess letters, and all the blanks will be filled in. When a word is complete, they will be given the score, and the number of the word will disappear. The score is based on several factors, and here are some of them: Shorter words are worth more points. Words with more vowels are worth less. Words with double letters are worth less. Guessing words early gives additional points. Letters all have different values and are used in several scoring methods. Example: Word is APPLE - You guessed early with this showing _PPL_ - You lose a few points for it having a double letter - You scored a lot of points because the E was not guessed yet. - You also scored points for the A being blank, but not as many. E is worth the MOST when not guessed, while letters like Z are worth the least. All the vowels are worth the most when left unguessed. Common letters like T, S, R, ETC... are worth a lot when left unguessed, of course not guessing those letters makes it very hard to guess the word early. - You lose points when you guess a letter that was already guessed. - You lose points when you press a number and that word is already guessed. (These are stupidity points lost, after all, all that information is right there on the screen. Multiple Word Lists You can create multiple word lists and the users can pick which one they want to play. There is no limit on how many word lists you have, just disk space. Each word list will have it's own high score file. To add a word list, just name it whatever you want, with the extension of LST. The program will automaticall create the index files. The LST file MUST be placed in the WORDS folder. The LST file should be a list of words, with no spaces or puncutation in it. Case is not important. Use words that are at least 3 characters long. If less then 3 characters are in the list, they will not be used by the program. If you want to use a different word list as your default, follow the following instructions: First, the default word list is called WORD.LST. If you replace this with your own list, you MUST delete the WORD.NO file so that the index will be recreated. See the file called file.txt for an explanation of all the files in this archive. Security Levels This I added as an afterthought, but some people may find it useful. You can create a file with the name of the word list and an extension of SEC that lists security levels and/or names of users who CANNOT access this certain word list. For example, if you want to keep Bill Clinton out, just include his name in this list. If you create a word list with adult words in it (send me a copy), just put all the security levels of the users you want to keep out. Just create a text file with the names or security levels in it. Case is not important, either is the order of the names/levels. Word List Rules - Case is not important. All words/phrases will be converted to Capitals - NO punctiation is allowed with the exception of the ' key. - All lists must have a single word or phrase on each line. Order is unimportant. - Only the letters A-Z and the ' key and the space bar are acceptable - the length of each word or phrase must be at least 3 characters and no more than 37 characters. Individual words in a phrase may be any size. Words/phrases in lists do not hurt anything, they are just not picked by my program when it is picking random words/phrases. - Be sure and delete the ???.no file after modifing a word list. NOTE: Unregistered versions DO NOT save the high scores.