Trackballs is a simple game similar to the classical game Marble Madness on the Amiga in the 80's. By steering a marble ball through a labyrinth filled with vicious hammers, pools of acid and other obstacles the player collects points. When the ball reaches the destination it continues at the next, more difficult level - unless the time runs out.
It should be noted that this game is not intended to be a replica of marble madness but rather inspired by it. For instance the game uses advanced 3D graphics even though the original game had no real use for it. Also we aim at making the game highly configurable by a scripting extension (Guile) and provide a simple editor by which new levels easily can be created.
You start Trackballs by giving the command trackballs which
instructs the game to load the first level. If you wish to cheat or simply
are testing out a level you are currently designing you can give the command
trackballs -l foo which jumps to level "foo". For more descriptions on how
to play trackballs and documentation of the level editor see the homepage at:
Have fun playing Trackballs!
Per default trackballs is not installed setuid or setgid and as such no serious security issues should arise as long as trackballs is played only with the default levels. However, extra levels can be designed by users and upload/download from the internet. Since the scripting capabilities within maps are very powerful it also means a security vulnerability if you are running custom maps created by others.
Never run a track downloaded from internet unless you trust the creator or if you have carefully read the corresponding .scm file of the track.
This also means that trackballs must never be run with the setuid flag set and preferably not with any setgui flags either unless you trust all your users completely (which still is a bad security practice!)
However, running trackballs without the setuid/setgid flags means that it
might not be possible for users to modify the highscores file (default
installed at /usr/local/share/trackballs/highScores) unless you have setup
the privileges of all users to allow this. Rather than setting trackballs
setgid games it is therefore better to use local highscore files on a per
user basis.
The simplest way to contribute levels, code, or updated translations is to make a pull request or issue at the current hosting location, namely
https://github.com/trackballs/trackballs
If possible, keep code contribution commits to focus on a single change
(i.e, "Fixed string typos"), and but try to avoid trivial updates: for
instance, when fixing string typos, fix all of them. Code should be
formatted with clang-format per the style control file .clang-format.
Avoid introducing new dependencies or code requiring more than C++03.
As levelset and translation improvements are easier to change than code, they may be passed in via the issue system.
If you have a question that needs answering, check the FAQ first.
Trackballs is provided under the GPL v2, or any later version, with one exception: some of the music uses the Ethymonics Free Music Licence.
The change log for Trackballs is NEWS.md.
To read about translating Trackballs, see ABOUT-NLS.md.
Find out who helped realize Trackballs at AUTHORS.md.
Think the game couldn't be better? Read TODO.md and think again!