7Colors V1.4 Users' help

 

What is 7Colors ?

7Colors is an old game first developed by I don't remember which company ;-). It's a strategy game where the aim is to conquer at least 50% of the diamonds of the board.

What is the status of 7Colors ?

7Colors is freeware. This means that you do not have anything to pay to use it. Its sources are also provided, so you can have a look at them and reuse some ideas in the code. The sources are distributed as an eMbedded Visual C++ Project and were developed with Microsoft eMbedded Tools.

This program is provided without any warranties. This means that I won't be responsible in any case of whatever happens if you use it. I also have no obligation to change, fix, upgrade or whatever 7Colors. This program is gracefully provided to who wants and need it, in any case I remain the author, with the right to do whatever I want with it.

Warning to users of previous version (1.2 and before) !

Previous versions (before 1.3) of 7Colors had a nasty bug that prevented uninstalling it cleanly. To install the new version of 7Colors, reboot your PocketPC. This will allow you to cleanly remove the old version. Then now you can install the new version.

How to play ?

Basically, it's a 2 players game in which each player play after each other in turn by choosing a color amongst those available with the buttons in the lower part of the screen. Every diamond adjacent (up-down-left-right, i.e. 4-connected) to some diamonds the player already have becomes the player's property and get his color. So to make the game more difficult, of course at one turn, a player is not allowed to choose the color he is already, and the color his opponent is currently. That's the reason why some color buttons are disabled with a small signal inside. The game ends when one of the players get 50% or more of the board. When "fences" are activated, some diamonds will be black colored. These ones will be set following the shape of the fence you decided to activate at the beginning of the game. This diamonds represent areas that cannot neither be conquered nor jumped over by any player. They are "no-man's lands" !..

The starting locations at the beginning of the game are always the same: first player at the bottom left, and second player at the upper right corners of the board. In order to show whose turn it is to play, the starting corner diamond of the player who must play is split with a white part.

It is possible to configure the game via the Options menu. You can set the players names, whether you want to play against another human or a computer opponent, the board size, if you want to enable fences (and if so, the shape you want to populate the initial board with), and finally the "spreading factor" that will determine the average size of 4-connected areas of the same color on the initial board (of course, the wider, the easier the game). Please, note that setting and confirming the options aborts the current game and start a new one.

Planned features

History

How to reach me ?

I will stay open to any suggestion, bug report, congratulation, fund donations ;-) So if you want to reach me, you can try my email address: fpessaux@cs.stevens-tech.edu.

I hope this little piece of software will be useful and you will enjoy it !... Cheers,

    -- François