Tetristar is an extensible multiplayer tetris game, mainly inspired from Tetrinet and TetrisFriends. The aim of this project is to produce a high quality, featureful, free and open source, portable tetris game.

Tetristar is licensed under the 2-clause BSD license.

Tetristar requires the following libraries:

• ENet
• GLib
• Gtk 2
• Cairo
• LibRsvg
• Lua

Those libraries should be available in most operating systems. For example, in Debian based systems, the corresponding packages are: libenet-dev, libglib2.0-dev, libgtk2.0-dev, libcairo2-dev, librsvg2-dev, liblua5.1-0-dev.

To build tetristar, SCons is also needed.

To build all the components of tetristar, just launch scons at the root of tetristar’s directory. To only build the server, launch scons server and to only build the clients, launch scons clients.

If you don’t want to install check, you can build the client and the server without launching the tests with scons clients server.

If Scons reports that a library is missing while it is installed, you might need to specify the name of the pkg-config description file of this lib. For example, if you have Lua 5.1, you might want to launch scons LUA‘lua5.1’=

The server executable is in the server/ subdirectory. Its behaviour can be configured in the config.lua file in the same directory. By defaults, it listens on localhost:12345 and the administrator’s password is foo. The available configuration options are:

• config.server: the address on which to listen (localhost by default)
• config.port: the port on which to listen (12345 by default)
• config.plugins: the list of plugins to load
• config.password: the administrator’s password (foo by default)
• config.datadir: the directory where data files are saved (/tmp by default)

Once launched, one can send a SIGUSR1 signal to the server to reload all the plugins.

For the moment there only exists two clients for tetristar: one in GTK (in clients/gtk/), the other in command line only used for debugging (in clients/simple/).

To launch the GTK client, just launch the executable from clients/gtk. The client’s layout is composed of two parts:

• The context, where the current state of the tetris game is displayed
• The chat, where the players can talk and send commands

To switch the focus between those two parts, the TAB key should be used. When the context has the focus, the player can move its pieces, etc. When the chat has the focus, the player can type messages or commands.

The keybinds of the context are the following:

• The arrow keys manipulates the piece
• The space key drops a piece
• The c swap the current piece with the kept piece
• The d key drops a bonus
• The number keys (1, 2, …) send a bonus to the corresponding player

The commands currently supported are the following:

• /password <pass>: authentificates to the server as administrator
• /start: start a new game if there is no current game
• /stop: stop the current game
• /disconnect: disconnect from the server
• /quit: quit the client

This section describe the architecture of Tetristar, for those who would like to contribute.

The protocol used between the server and the clients is described in protocol.org.

Tetristar’s server and GTK client both use libtetris to store the current state of the game. The complete state is known by the server, and the clients only know a part of this state (eg. they don’t know what bonuses the other players have). All the state computations are done by the server (this is different than tetrinet, where it is the clients that does the computations), thus preventing cheating from malicious clients.

The main features of the server are written with plugins. Plugins consists of lua functions registered to events. When the event occur, they are called with the appropriate parameters and can manipulate the server’s state or send data to the clients. The following plugins exists and are activated by default:

• admin.lua: allow players to authenticate as administrator, to be able to start or stop a game
• bonus.lua: implement the bonuses (called specials in tetrinet)
• connection.lua: handle clients connection and disconnection
• field.lua: implement various helper functions manipulating the matrix
• game.lua: the most important plugin, handle the player events (drop, move, rotate, …)
• im.lua: implement the instant messaging system to allow the players to chat during a game
• kept.lua: implement the kept piece and handle the related messages
• piece.lua: implement helper functions to manipulate pieces
• stats.lua: compute stats during the game and send them as server messages to the clients at the end of a game
• utils.lua: some helper functions
• winlist.lua: implement the winlist, that keep tracks of the most winning players

The GTK client also uses plugins to handle the data sent by the server:

• bonus.lua: handles the bonuses (print messages when they are used, and display them)
• chat.lua: handle the messages to be printed in the chat
• field.lua: handle the changes in the field sent by the server and compute the pieces shadows
• game.lua: handle the game status
• kept.lua: handle the kept piece
• piece.lua: implement piece transformations, used to compute the shadows
• utils.lua: implement utils to parse the field sent by the server