[Brian Theado] 20Jan2005 - Inspired by the wealth of Tcl/Tk games available at [sdarchive] and elsewhere, I wrote some code that can be used to browse and execute a bunch of applications all bundled together into a single starkit.

I bundled together over 60 games in a just over 2MB starkit that can be downloaded from http://tkoutline.sourceforge.net/tkgamepack.kit.  Run the program and see a hierarchical list of Tcl/Tk games.  Click on the game title to launch it.  Click on the game's url to find more information.  Add the title of a game to the command line and that game will be run directly.

[http://tkoutline.sourceforge.net/tkgamepack.png]

'''Implementation details.'''
   * Each game is itself an unmodified starkit.  Each starkit's vfs resides as a subdirectory of the main directory of the Game pack starkit
   * Each game is launched in its own slave interpreter.
   * Most of the starkits were pulled unmodified from [sdarchive].  I found a couple of dozen more games on the wiki and at [tclapps] that I starkitified and added in.  Some of these needed a "package require Tk" added.
   * I did have to modify one game [dots and boxes] because it was trying to do some things with the console that didn't work in a slave interpreter.
   * The interface for selecting games is an outline from [tkoutline].  The full functionality of tkoutline is also available (see the miscelleneous category) just because it is there.
   * I find the interface to be a bit cluttered, but using an outline was the easiest way for me to get this working (and I am motivated to make use of my own code).
   * Adding new games involves adding new text to the launcher outline (using the full version of tkoutline) and adding a new starkit vfs.

''Way cool!  I've wondered for a long time when someone would take the initiative on this ;) -[jcw]''

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[LV] As of Feb 23, 2005, the game pack contains over 60 games or ''toys''.

[LV] So, if people come up with additional script only games, how would they
go about requesting the code be added?

[Brian Theado] - putting a request here seems like a good start.

Here are what seems to be some additional games.  However, I am not certain
whether any of these match what you already have, perhaps by a different name.

[A little Go board] [A little Morse trainer] [A simple memory game]
[A text adventure game engine]
[Alphabet Wheel]
[another Asteroids] [Asteroids]
[Babbleback machine] [Cellular automata] [Life] [Life in Snit]
[Chess] [Chess in Tcl]
[Domino] [Hanoi Towers]
[Hearts]
[iKnow: a pocket quiz] [isolation]
[Jigsaw Puzzler]
[Ludo] [Magic Cards] [Monopoly] [Pingpong]
[Ramble] [Sailplane Flying Game]
[Space Game] [Sudoku]
[Tangram] [The Gallows game]
[The word-chain game] [Tilt Mazes]
[TkAlign4] [tkchess] [TkPool]
[vector.tk] [Vertigo - a little Tk game]


I don't know whether there are others which could be included or not.

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[LV] So each time I select a game, a new starkit will end up in the real world flat
directory where the starkit resides?  Is there no way to run the starkits from where
they are in the bundle?

[Brian Theado] - I guess I didn't explain the implementation well enough.  It is a single file and stays a single file.  All the games run from within the starkit.

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'''Error reports'''

[[Removed information about package require Tk error that has been fixed]]

[UKo] 2005-02-23: What are these fixed errors about?  There still is an error ''can't find package Tk'' every time a game is launched -- if wishkit (8.4.9) is used on Mac OSX.  The problem is in the initial auto_path of a slave interpreter. This doesn't contain an entry for the path where the Tk-shared-library can be found (it's not the same place as for the Tcl-shared-library).  A workaround is to set the complete path after cloning a new interp in function runSlaveKit:
  + $s eval [list set auto_path $::auto_path]
    $s eval [list set argv $args]

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Discussion about keysym error (which has been fixed) moved to [Cross platform keysyms].
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If you get an error like "couldn't open setup.tcl, no such..." when launching a game like [Felipe Voloch] reported, then try getting the latest version of tclkit.  Any tclkits built in 2004 or later (and probably some in 2003) contain the fix for launching starkits in slave interpreters.

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[Category Games]