Play Colobot

Colobot is a real-time strategy game, where you can program your units (bots) in a language called CBOT.

Your mission is to find a new planet to live and survive.

This game has been ported to Haiku, let's discover it, and review its gameplay.

In order to install the Colobot game, go into Haiku Depot and search for "colobot" in the "All packages" tab:

Proceed with the installation and launch the game.

At the beginning, the main screen below will appear asking to provide your player name :

Missions

Colobot is proposing some missions to familiarize you with the game.

Let's review a few of them. Click on the "Missions" button :

You first mission will consist in building some equipments :

As you can see, Colobot is displaying a world in 3D :

I wasn't able to check the FPS, however on a bare metal system it's fluid enough to have a good game experience.

If you hit "F1", you will access to the details of your current mission :

The game is giving the scenario regarding the mission :

And you can get the immediate objective :

What is great with Colobot game, is that it's proposing hyperlinks in this game meaning you can access to every information you need quickly. For instance the controls details are available :

You have also a shortcut to do a quick save with F5 :

I've noticed that sometimes the game is being stuck, so my advice is to save the game regularly. The first goal of the game consists to retrieve your survival pack.

This survival pack is next to the Houston center. Once you get it, the mission is accomplished :)

Easy. Now let's review the second mission :

You will need to create some buildings :

The corresponding buildings are a research center and a bot factory.

You will have all the details on how to build them :

If you click on the bot factory hyperlink, you will see the below details :

The research center link give you also the possibility for new technologies research :

As indicated in the requirements for the building, the research center needs at least 5 meters of free space.

Put a titanium cube on the floor :

And start to build the building :

Just wait a few seconds :

And the building will grow from the floor with a nice animation :)

Once the building is completed, you can start to check fort the second one :

Put another titanium cube on the floor :

And start the bot factory :

Great it's now completed !

As you can see, it's an easy mission.

The last mission consist to have the minimum required to go to the moon.

The below smooth scene will be displayed :

A spaceship is transported near the research center :

Huge one isn't it ?

Let's check the mission details :

You will need to put a black box inside the spaceship before being able to take off:

However a tracked grabber is required for that :

And a power cell is needed also to make it working :

The research center is a prerequisite to study how to build this new machine :

Let's take one of the power cell nearby the research center :

Put it inside the research center :

Like this :

Click on the "Run research for tracked bots" button :

Now let's build the tracked grabber up to the bots factory. For that, take a titanium cube nearby :

And put it in the bots factory :

Select the factory :

And start to build the tracked grabber :

The door will close :

And when it's opened again, you will see a fresh new tracked grabber :

To use it, put a power cell inside :

Select the tracked grabber :

And start to move it :

Go into the direction of the mountain nearby :

Once the black box is found, go in front of it :

And start grab it :

The black box can be transported to your spaceship now!

Use the access ramp to go inside the spaceship :

Once on the top of the spaceship, put the black box down :

What is remaining now, is to get the wheeled grabber. Select it and move it inside the spaceship as well :

Everything is now in order ! You can take off the spaceship :

There's a nice animation about the spaceship takeoff :

Once its doors are closed, let's go to the moon :)

The next mission is about extracting titanium on the moon :

Another nice animation will be displayed from planet Earth :

To the Moon :

The spaceship is landing on the Moon's floor :

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"

The doors will then open :

And the moon's mission can now start :)

Exercices

Colobot is also providing some nice programming exercices :

"Follow a path" for instance, is a simple exercise to move a robot according to a program written in CBOT language :

You will have all the details as below :

A CBOT program is like a C++ program with functions :

Pay attention about upper case and lower case like other languages :)

As you can see, the pads are in blue on the floor :

You have to identify the path the robot must follow in order to reach the last pad without problem :

Before starting, just put a power cell inside the robot :

Then you can use the example program below :

Check the code by clicking the corresponding icon :

And do a copy/paste of this code into a fresh new program :

Once the program is running, you will see the robot following the instructions :

If the program is correctly written, the robot will reach the final pad according to the mission :

And your mission will be a success.

You can continue to discover the other exercises or check for challenges or code battle.

The default resolution of 800x600 is just fine to have fluid gameplay and animations.

You can test other resolutions, but higher ones will require additional software rendering.

Colobot is a great game written by Terranova Team which is a nice addition to Haiku.

It's one of the first game I've discovered proposing 3D fluid animations under this system.

Why not giving it a try ?

If you want to know more about the game, you can check the Colobot official website.