This is the documentation for the current versions, 0.8p and 0.8.1p. 
Please see our forums for further assistance with Slingshot.
Installing:
Download the latest version for your platform (Linux, Mac OS X or Windows) from our Downloads page. Further instructions, where required, are included with the download.
If you need any help with finding the right download and installing it, the first place you should try is our forums.
General Gameplay:
The first screen you'll see when playing a game
Slingshot is very quick to learn, and indeed very quick to play and enjoy, but you could spend a very, very long time learning to master it.
The main game screen of Slingshot shows a selection of planets, with two spaceships, one at each side. Two players, each controlling one spaceship, take turns to shoot at their opponent.
Player one's spaceship is on the left and is coloured orange, player two's spaceship is on the right and is coloured blue.
Which player goes first is randomly decided by the computer, but it is evident because the spaceship which is to start will have a long thin 'projection' emerging from the front. This 'projection' is the aiming line, it is used to show where the spaceship is aiming.
Every time a spaceship is destroyed, a new 'arena' is generated, and the player with the lowest score takes the first shot in the new round.
Controls:
Pressing the right and left arrow keys on the keyboard will turn the currently active spaceship clockwise and anti-clockwise, the aiming line will also move to show where the spaceship will fire. Pressing the up and down arrow keys will change the length of the aiming line, the length of the line represents the power with which the projectile will be fired, which in turn determines the initial velocity of the shot.
Note that if you hold any key down for a short time, it's action will repeat, this is useful to rotate the ship a large amount.
Pressing either space or enter will fire the shot.
The other controls are multipliers, holding control (ctrl) down while making any adjustment, makes them smaller for fine tuning the aiming, holding down alt makes very small adjustments for even finer tuning. Holding shift down makes the adjustment bigger, which is sometimes useful for making large changes.
Finally, the current angle and power of the aiming can be viewed at the top of the screen before the shot is fired.
On Screen Information:
While the game is in aiming mode (when no shot is in flight), there are several pieces of useful information displayed on screen.
At the top left and right of the screen are the current scores of each player, note that they can be negative numbers.
At the top, and in the middle of the screen are the angle and power of the shot currently being aimed. These can prove useful if for some reason it is difficult to see what the aiming line is doing, or if one of your shots has gone either side of your opponent and you want to 'split the difference'.
In the middle and at the bottom of the screen is the current round count. By default it simply says something like 'Round 5', but if a set number of rounds has been specified for a game, it will say something like 'Round 12 of 20'. See the settings menu for setting a specific number of rounds.
When a shot is in flight, some of the information on screen changes:
In the middle at the top, the angle and power are replaced with the current 'Power Penalty' (see the scoring section below for more information).
In the middle at the bottom, the time until the current shot times out is displayed, something like 'Timeout in 726'. When this counter reaches 0, the shot will be void and the next player will have a turn. The timeout can be altered in the settings menu. The timeout is necessary because it is possible to place a shot into an orbit which is (at least reasonably) stable, in this state the shot could continue indefinitely.
Scoring:
There are two ways in which a players score changes:
Firstly, a player loses 2000 points if they destroy their own spaceship.
Secondly, a player earns points if they destroy their opponent - in this case, the score is broken down into three components.
The base score for hitting your opponent is 1500 points.
There is a bonus for hitting your opponent with one of your first three shots. If you make the hit with your first shot, you earn a bonus of 500 points, with the second shot you earn 200 points, and with your third shot you earn 100 points.
Finally, there is a 'Power Penalty' - this is dependent on the amount of power you used to fire the shot. You can think of this as a fuel cost, as it increases with the amount of power you use on the shot. Specifically, the power penalty is 5 times the power you used, so if the shot was fired with a power of 100, the power penalty will be 500. This penalty is intended to encourage creative play - the use of the gravity of the planets to 'slingshot' the projectile around before hitting the opponent means using less launching power, and that means a higher score. So to get a high score, you'll need to learn how to use the gravity to help you.
The Menu:
The main menu is accessible at any time by pressing escape (Esc) - it contains five items:
Back to game - this will exit the menu and return to the current game.
New game - this will apply any settings, changes, clear the scores, and start a new game.
Settings - this will take you to the settings menu.
Help - this will display the help screen, it gives basic information and the control keys.
Quit - this will exit the game.
The menu can be navigated with the up and down arrow keys, items can be selected with either space or enter. To move to a higher level menu you can select 'back' from the current menu, or press escape (Esc).
The Settings Menu:
The settings menu allows changing of the game settings, there are 3 sub-menus:
Game style - this will take you to the game styles menu.
Game options - this will take you to the game options menu.
Graphics - this will take you to the graphics setup.
There is also an option to apply the settings - select this after changing anything in the game style or game options menu, note that it will also reset the scores and start a new game.
Game Style Menu:
The game styles menu consists of four tick/check boxes:
Random - this generates a random combination of the below styles for each round.
Fixed power - this mode locks the power of the shot at 200.
Bounce - this mode makes the edges of the screen solid, all shots will bounce off the edges rather than leaving the screen.
Invisible planets - this mode simply makes the planets invisible, they can still be hit, but they cannot be seen.
Any combination of the above can be selected together, with the exception of 'Random'. When 'Random' is selected, the other boxes are 'greyed out' and have no effect.
Remember that you'll have to either apply the settings (from the settings menu), or start a new game (from the main menu) before these game modes will be applied.
Game Options Menu:
This menu contains the general game options, after selecting one of them, the value can be changed with the up and down arrow keys, and set by pressing enter:
Max number of planets - this sets the maximum number of planets which can be shown on the screen in any given round, this is a maximum, not an average or a specific number.
Number of rounds - this sets the number of rounds which will constitute a game, by default it is set to infinite - the rounds will continue indefinitely.
Shot timeout - this sets the shot timeout, the default is 750.
Remember that you'll have to either apply the settings (from the settings menu), or start a new game (from the main menu) before these game modes will be applied.
Graphics Menu:
The graphics menu allows you to change the graphic settings for the game, currently the only entry in this menu is 'Particles', this specifies whether or not the explosion particles are drawn. Setting this to 'off' may help the game run on slower computers.
Known Bugs / Issues:
The current version is believed to function well, and have no bugs as such, but there are a couple of issues:
Jerky / Runs Slowly:
The current version of the game is written in python, for those technical people, this is an interpreted language. Basically due to the way the game is written, it requires a lot of computing power, hence it runs slowly on some older computers. Please keep checking this website for the release of version 0.9, when the game will be rewritten to run much faster on older machines.
Problem playing on Windows:
If you have installed Slingshot on a Microsoft Windows computer, but when you start the game it simply opens a window, and then vanishes, you've found the colour depth issue. Slingshot currently requires a colour depth of greater than 16 bit. To change the colour depth in windows, right click on your desktop, click properties, click the settings tab and then change the value in the colour depth selection box to something like 24 or 32 bit.
Improving this Documentation:
The slingshot website is a wiki, that means that anybody can edit the content of these pages to help fix mistakes, complete the documentation, or file bugs or suggestions. You can either click the edit button at the top of a page, or double click on a paragraph of text to edit just that section. If you wish to practice, please visit the wiki sandbox - the help page will assist you in learning how to edit this and other wikis.
You are encouraged to edit this documentation, to help make it more clear and easy to understand, and to make it more complete. Please be considerate and careful with your edits, while at the same time being bold enough to be helpful and make a difference.
Please note: ANY INAPPROPRIATE INFORMATION THAT HAS BEEN INTENTIONALLY ADDED WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.
After editing, however small the edit, feel free to add yourself to the list in the credits section below.
Thank you. :-)
Credits:
Slingshot was created by Jonathan Musther and Bart Mak.
Bart Mak wrote the code and came up with ideas for gameplay and implementation.
Jonathan Musther started the project and came up with later ideas for gameplay, he created all of the graphics and started this documentation.
Many thanks to the people who have helped with this documentation:
your name
your name
