Some New Morabaraba Development

New AHEM Board: New default theme for AHEM

It's been a while since I made any progress on my Morabaraba software suite. The last release was made on 14 April, and I haven't done much work on it since then. The reason is partly due to the fact that I have been stupefyingly busy, and partly because I've reached a point where I have a few Big Ideas which need quite a lot of work to come to fruition - enough to put me off. So I've bitten the bullet, and started to convert the Morabaraba GUI into a reusable Lazarus control. This gives me a chance to really restructure and tidy up the Lazarus GUI code, which is a bit crufty, as well as providing a much cleaner separation of UI elements from the rest of the application. This will also provide "enabling technology" for the graphical FIMS client; with the reusable component in place, the FIMS client becomes much less daunting. With a working FIMS client, I can see myself polishing off the FIMS server!

I am incidentally taking the opportunity to make the GUI themeable; it should be quite simple to create your own board/piece themes when its done. This is neat on its own, but is also enabling technology for supporting other variants (eg Nine Men's Morris, Sesotho Morabaraba) in AHEM. Also, the image associated with this blog entry is how the new default theme is shaping up - animation still to come, but it should be more "serious" than the current AHEM theme, as well as perhaps less visually distracting. Hopefully this will make AHEM even easier to live with.

Of course, that image is just the control on its own. Once the control is finished, I will start work on a new release of AHEM, which will hopefully use the control to improve on playing and reviewing games. I may also put in some basic game database functionality, although it depends on time - I want to get a release out soon-ish, and if database functionality is going to take an age, it will have to wait.