Apricots has nothing to do with apricots. It's a game where you fly a little plane around the screen and shoot things and drop bombs on enemy targets, and it's meant to be quick and fun.
Apricots has been tested on Linux and Mac OS. It should also be buildable on any UNIX platform that meets the requirements below.
Windows support is currently unknown. There was Windows support at one point, but I don't have access to a Windows machine to check recent changes haven't broken anything. Contributions are always welcome!
- A C++ compiler (GCC/G++ and Clang/LLVM)
- SDL > 2.0.0, download from https://www.libsdl.org
- OpenAL, download from https://www.openal-soft.org
- ALURE 1.2.0, download from https://kcat.tomasu.net/alure.html
./configure # use --prefix= if you want to install to somewhere other than /usr/local
make
make install # may require sudo if you don't have permission to write to the target prefix
Note that on MacOS you may need set LDFLAGS and CPPFLAGS environment
variables. If you're using brew then it will tell you what to set these
variables to.
As well as the requirements for building from source, you will require GNU
Autotools. The bootstrap script will create the configure script for you.
./bootstrap
./configure # use --prefix= if you want to install to somewhere other than /usr/local
make
make install # may require sudo if you don't have permission to write to the target prefix
The original author, Mark Snellgrove, wrote the following:
The original version of the game dates back to around 1991. The very first version of the game was written on an Amiga, using the AMOS language, and the game was called 'Planegame'. This was a very simple affair with simplistic landscapes, no guns or shrapnel, and very limited computer AI. It was also dreadfully slow. The AMOS compiler improved things somewhat at a later date. A couple of years later I obtained the BLITZ language for the Amiga, and ported 'Planegame' carefully over to that, resulting in a huge speedup. Impressed by the capabilities of BLITZ, in 1995 I proceeded to rewrite the game entirely from scratch, even using completely new graphics and sound. The result was 'Planegame2', which, for various reasons also got dubbed 'Apricots'. This new version of the game added anti-aircraft guns, shrapnel, trees, towers, water, better airbases and a huge improvement on graphics, sound, and intelligent computer AI. Slightly later, in 1996, the Draks were added as a bit of amusement. The result was a highly playable game, which I distributed to a few of my friends. A few years later and I now use a PC, which can run Linux Having learnt C++ by this time, at the beginning of 2002 I felt ready enough to port 'Apricots' cross platform from BLITZ on the Amiga to C++ on a Linux PC. What you see here is work in progress on that port. The game has been tweaked slightly while being ported over, so is not identical to the Amiga version.
moggers87 took over this project in 2019 as the original website had disappeared.
See AUTHORS
The game is still under development. Apricots-0.2.8 is a beta release using the SDL2 library. Despite this, it is highly playable. Please open a Github issue to report bugs, feature requests, or comments.
| CONTROLS | PLAYER 1 | PLAYER 2 |
|---|---|---|
| ROTATE LEFT | CURSOR LEFT | Z |
| ROTATE RIGHT | CURSOR RIGHT | C |
| ACCELERATE / STEALTH | CURSOR UP | S |
| DROP BOMB | CURSOR DOWN | X |
| FIRE SHOT | RETURN | LEFT CTRL |
Stay alive, and shooting enemy targets gains you points, whereas being shot down or shooting the wrong things lose you points. You have infinite planes, and are competing against the other computer planes (or other player!). First to a certain score wins once they land at base.
At present there is no option screen. Options can be changed by editing the configuration file apricots.cfg. This is first searched for in ~/.config/apricots/, then the system configuration directory (usually /usr/local/etc or /etc) and finally the default configuration in the data directory.
The number and type of planes can be varied, along with the airbases, as can 1/2 player game be chosen. The number of anti aircraft guns and scenery can be selected. Draks can be turned on or off, and a different condition for winning the game can be chosen.
Apricots falls under the GPL. Please read the file COPYING included in this distribution. The source code of Apricots will either be included in the distribution, or can otherwise be downloaded from the Apricots webpage (see below)
For updates, bug fixes, source code and more info please visit the Apricots webpage at https://github.com/moggers87/apricots