Welcome to Tic Tac Toe for CRoom and America Online What is Tic Tac Toe? If you don't know by now then there's no hope. :) What do I need? America Online for Window, CRoom from Tartan Software and the program that came with this file. How do I play? Simple. Start up AOL and CRoom. Go to a chat room. Find someone else who wants to play too and has the same software. You both then start up TTT. One player selects his opponent and his name from the list and the other player does the same and also clicks on the "I'll Play X" check box. The game screen will come up. X goes first. After X makes their move, then O goes. Play continues until either side wins, or a tie is reached. Why? Even simpler. In some chats I'm sorted interested in the topic, but I really don't want to stare at a screen for an hour waiting for the good part. I've found others do the same thing. Now we can amuse and entertain ourselves while in a chat. The future? I'm glad you asked. Since I use simple DDE links to CRoom, I was able to get the basics up and running in a matter of a few hours. I envision myself and others writing all sorts of Chat Room games. I've already had requests for Chess, Checkers, Diplomacy, Backgammon, Risk, Monopoly, and Multi-Player War/Strategy games. The only real limit is speed. Action games won't work, but games involving players taking turns will. How do I (you?) write similar games? See below. Legal Stuff: Tic Tac Toe for CRoom is Copyright (c) 1994, Virtual Systems CRoom is Copyright (c) 1994, Tartan Software America Online, Tartan Software and Virtual Systems take no responsibilities in any way for the use or mis-use of this software. TTT is copyrighted, however it is being released at no charge so others may learn from and build off of the ideas presented here. Special thanks to Mark Gamber who wrote CRoom and suggested the idea of playing games during chats via CRoom. Writing your own games is actually pretty easy. First off, the source to TTT is being made available for everyone to disect, rip appart, destroy, etc. The principle is really pretty easy. I establish a DDE Link with CRoom. From that link I can get a list of people in the room and also get each line of text as it passes onto your screen. By sending parameters and codes in these lines of text I can send or get messages with other players (other copies of the same game). CRoom allows you to use the bracket command to "hide" the text so others using CRoom don't see it. {d at the beginning of any line will prevent that line from showing up on the display. What happens in TTT is as follows. Establish Link. Parse list and get individual names. (newer versions of CRoom help automate this part). Display list of names and ask for Opponent and Players name. (in order to figure out which messages are for you, you need to find out the name of who is playing.) Start game. Enable Player 1's commands, disable Player 2's commands. Player 1 moves. Disable Player 1, process Player 1's mover, enable Player 2's commands. Repeat above line flipping players as necessary. If someone wins post messages, same for losing or a tie. End game. REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF HERE ::: REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF HERE I am going to force one thing on everyone writing these games. A small set of standards MUST be set from the beginning and the following rules and example will be the standards. I am doing this for 2 reasons. 1- to avoid confusion in chats, and 2- so multiple different games can all be going simultaneously. When sending data ALWAYS use the following format: 3 characters up to 8 characters comma up to 10 chars comma otherinfo {d gamename , playername , Tic Tac Toe looks like the following: {d TTT,VirtualSys,3 when it sends a command for move (square) 3. If you need to send the move info to everyone in the game, then you can use the word "ALL". For example: {d SpaceWar,ALL,red,8,delta,3,4843,4434.22,444,987.33 This should be handled by your program as a update to everyone involved. For a space game, you might send out general info for each move to everyone in the game "ALL", but two players in an alliance would exchange info direct to each other "Fred123" and "Mary456" for example. After the {d, gamename, and playername, you're free to put whatever you want as far as passing data back and forth in your game. Following this standard will avoid any conflicts in games talking to each other. As long as everyone uses a different name for their game there shouldn't be any problems there either. I will volunteer my services as a gamename keeper if needed. You can send me email on AOL to VirtualSys and I will let you know if anyone else is already using the gamename in their program. What I envision a year from now is various chat rooms in People Connection full of people chatting and gaming all at once. The chat will look just like it always did, but in the background all sorts of gaming data will be flying back and forth. Someone might be playing chess against someone, tic tac toe against someone else, and intergalatic war games with 4 other people... all while chatting. Sound good? Well, start writing those games. Tic Tac Toe for CRoom was written entirely in Visual Basic Professional 3, however I didn't use any of the Professional features. You can contact me on America Online at the following addresses (in order of prefrence) PCC Gary VirtualSys <--- use this for gamename registration. or via the internet at PCC Gary@AOL.COM VirtualSys@AOL.COM garyd@Interaccess.com I love to get responses on my programs, so if you have any comments or questions, feel free to email them to me. I don't plan on doing any updates to TTT, but I will be writing something new. I haven't decided yet, but it will probably be a multi player (hopefully up to 32) game of some type. Normally you'll find me in the PC Development Forum conference room on AOL. I've also made the source code available for downloading on AOL. It too is located in the PC Development Forum. Look in the software libraries using VirtualSystems as a search word. If you do write your own programs and distribute source or tell others how to write similar programs, PLEASE include the section from this file about the standards to follow so there are no conflicts. Final note. People in a chat not using CRoom will see wierd stuff in the chat. (your codes for the game). If staff members request that you not play during scheduled chats or when they're hosting, please honor those requests.