Mancala in C

Yay! I installed the new hard drive, and I'm still getting everything in place, but development on Mancala in C should resume shortly. Now that the chaos has cleared, I can point out two things:

• I found another mancala implementation, which will be added to the FAQ shortly -- or perhaps to a forthcoming "Links" page.


• Matthias Saou of freshrpms.net fame has begun packaging SDL_ttf in RPM format. Since Fedora Core 1 now comes with SDL and SDL_image by default, Fedora users need only grab SDL_ttf and SDL_ttf-devel to compile mancala. (You can also add freshrpms.net to /etc/yum.conf and run 'yum install SDL_ttf SDL_ttf-devel'. Some black magic required; see these incantations for details.)

Note that CVS is still broken. I intend to remedy that shortly, however. Just a little more catching up to do, and then I can start moving forward again!

Urk. My hard drive died, which means that development on this project has basically stalled. I'm running off Knoppix, which should be fine for a while, but it means I can't really install the libraries I need to do any kind of coding on this project. Sorry folks -- I hope it won't take too long to get a new hard drive, but I'm not making any promises right now.

Mancala now uses GNU autotools! Yay!

(urgh, was that a pain in the posterior... sorry, folks, but autotools ain't as easy to use as it's made out to be. Nonetheless, many thanks to Felipe Bergo for his autotools tutorial.)

Intrepid souls, please note that CVS is broken right now! I'm still deciding where to put the pixmaps and other junk, since autotools prefers /usr/local and I prefer /usr. We'll see who wins... You'll have to manually install the files in res/ to the appropriate places (see the old Makefile).

I'm hoping to have this packaged soon... it was good for me to have a pretty solid block of time today for hacking on this. Snow... ^^;;

Quick status update:

The project is still alive -- the transition to a new semester was a bit bumpy, the weather has been nasty, SourceForge has been grouchy, and I've just plain been busy. I did manage to find the time to add a time-based random seed, so the AI should be less predictable, and I imported the Vera Serif-Bold font into the repository, so you won't have to install the Vera fonts any more.

This will probably end up packaged as a 0.1.1 release, though I probably won't post it to freshmeat or anything like that. I would really like to have a proper autoconf-based configure script, and there's a nasty memory leak I need to fix, but I may need to wait until 0.2.0 to do that. It seems dumb to release a point upgrade with just two changes, but the others may take some time. I'll see what I end up doing.

I've made the first release of the graphical version of Mancala. Get it here. It's only a start -- use it at your own risk. You'll need SDL, SDL_image, SDL_ttf, and the Bitstream Vera fonts to compile mancala from source.

I've only compiled it successfully on my Fedora box. Other Linux distributions shouldn't be too problematic, but make sure to read the INSTALL file and check main.h if you're having problems. I attempted to compile it under mingw on Windows but was unsuccessful -- if anyone has better luck, please e-mail me.

(Note: If you recompile, you *must* run 'make uninstall' before 'make install'. It's a kludge, but it works for now. I'm going to make mancala play with autoconf and automake Any Day Now).

Enjoy!

Happy happy happy. Very very happy. This project is coming together so nicely I keep pinching myself. Sure, the code's a little gnarly yet, it needs better comments and documentation, etc. etc. Sure, I need to rework it so it will compile across computers and platforms (it's currently my-Linux-box-centric :). But it's coming -- man, is it coming!

Observe:


Notice how the computer's side of the board is grayed out, since you can't move from it. Notice how the stones under my mouse cursor (which you can't see in the screenshot) are highlighted. Notice how it's chewing up a really reasonable amount of CPU, which is again only obvious offscreen. This, friends, ROCKS, if I do say so myself. Happy happy happy.

I am now able to dim and highlight stones! Man, was that interesting to write. (and now I need sleep... will update with more later :)