Defuse Division is a real-time competitive multiplayer implementation of the game Minesweeper that you can play in your terminal. Defuse Division is written entirely in Python3.
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To install and play, run:
pip install defusedivision defusedivision # Starts the game
Alternatively, you can clone this repository and run the play-defusedivision
file in this repository (which works in the same way as the defusedivision
command which is installed when you install via pip):
git clone "https://github.com/lelandbatey/defuse_division" cd defuse_division ./play-defusedivision
If you want to play head to head against multiple people, you have two options:
You can run a dedicated server with the command:
defusedivision --serveronly
This will launch a dedicated DefuseDivision server on port 44444. You can
customize the port and interface with the --port and --host command line
arguments.
You can play and host a server for other people to play on by selecting the option in the main menu labeled 'Host and play'. This will launch a game server on port 44444 on your machine exposed on all interfaces and connect to that server. This server will also use Zeroconf/mDNS to advertise itself on the local network, so other people on the same network as you will see your server in the box labeled 'Local Servers' under the 'Multiplayer' menu.
DefuseDivision is a terminal based game leveraging some semi-specialized
features of terminal emulators. Some terminal emulators don't support the
necessary features, and will break or not run. For example, PuTTY on Windows
works very poorly with this game.
The actual requirements are:
- Unicode support
- Specialized unicode characters are used to draw certain elements of the game, and will display as missing characters like "�" or "□" if your terminal doesn't support them
- Color terminal support
- If your terminal doesn't support colors, hopefully it will display an error explaining what's happened, but the game may simply crash or refuse to run.
I've tested DefuseDivision on the following platforms/terminal emulators and found them to work with the base game:
| Operating System | Terminal Emulator | TERM Environment Variable |
|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS | rxvt-unicode-256color | rxvt-unicode-256color |
| Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS | gnome-terminal | xterm-256color |
| Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS | xfce4-terminal | xterm-256color |
DefuseDivision can try to play sounds with the --withsound command line
argument. Sound is played through the pygame library, if it is installed. If
pygame is not installed, sound will not be played, even if the --withsound
argument is passed.
On my Linux installation, to enable playing sound through pygame, I had to
set the environment variable SDL_AUDIODRIVER to the value alsa (but
when I did so, CPU usage spiked markedly). If sound is not working, or sound is
playing very erratically (such as crackling, static-like crunching noises while
audio plays), you probably need to install the libsdl1.2 libraries. To
install on Ubuntu, I installed like so:
sudo apt install libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev
Sound has not been tested on any system other than Linux.
usage: defusedivision [-h] [--height HEIGHT] [--width WIDTH] [--mines MINES]
[--debug] [--vimkeys] [--maxsize] [--withsound]
[--playername PLAYERNAME] [--host HOST] [--port PORT]
[--serveronly]
Play a game of minesweeper. Use arrows to move, 'enter' or 'space' to probe,
'f' to flag, CTRL-C to exit.
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--height HEIGHT the height of the board (default=16)
--width WIDTH the height of the board (default=16)
--mines MINES number of mines on the board
--debug
--vimkeys allows vim control keys while playing game (HJKL for
move, space to probe)
--maxsize makes game use largest minefield that fits on your
screen
--withsound if passed, attempts to use sound
--playername PLAYERNAME
name of your player
--host HOST remote host to connect to
--port PORT port of remote host
--serveronly if true, run as dedicated server
Of these commands, the --height, --width, --mines, --maxsize,
and --playername options will affect both remote and local games. This is
intentional, to allow you to run mulitplayer games with whatever settings you
like, but it may allow a stranger to do stupid stuff or even crash your game.
- If you hold down a direction key on the main menu for an indeterminate amount of time, eventually curses will start corrupting the contents of the screen.
- This is a result of the concurrent way input and display updating are are handled in this program, specifically it happens because calling
getchon a window object also causes that window to be refreshed, and since input and updating are handled concurrently, very occasionallygetchis called while the window is already refreshing, causing two refreshes of the window object to happen simultaneously, causing some corruption of the screen. This can only be solved by transitioning to usingcurses.padobjects instead ofcurses.windowobjects, but the bug is so intermittent that I haven't done it yet for the menus, though the fix has been implemented for the in-game display.
- This is a result of the concurrent way input and display updating are are handled in this program, specifically it happens because calling
- The
--vimkeysoption doesn't enable vim control keys in the menus - That's broken since the menus are using a hardcoded set of keys for movement and selection, instead of the more abstract movement used while actually playing a game of minesweeper. I'll get around it implementing that one day
- The
- It's possible to crash another players client by connecting to a server with a
--heightand--widththat is so large it causes curses to attempt to draw out of bounds characters - It's possible to crash a server by connecting with a
--minesnumber set higher than the number of cells in the minefield. - The
--playernameargument allows users to have names that are really long and which include newlines, which could be abused