Lazarus

In spite of the weekend having a late start (flooding "down South" severely disrupted train and road travel, meaning it took a loooong time to get home from London), I've managed to complete most of the work on the new Morabaraba control. Here's what it has:

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.

Excited by progress on the new Lazarus-based GUI, I've decided to make a prerelease of AHEM version 0.5 so that all of those who've been waiting for the new GUI can take a peek. You can download the Windows prerelease here - just unzip the files and run ahemgui.exe. The following items still remain before 0.5 is officially released:

• Implementation of the "machine gunning" rule
• Visual representation of cows in hand during first phase (slightly irritating in the prerelease)
• Selection of skill levels in the GUI
• Engine shared library and GUI binaries for Linux

The prerelease already contains the best Morabaraba engine I've ever released. This version can also be compiled (without any source code changes) by GCC, MSVC and the Intel C Compiler, increasing performance and removing the Cygwin dependency.

AHEM Screenshot: AHEM Screenshot
Just a sneak preview of what the new GUI for Adam's Happy Electronic Morabaraba will look like - it's still under development, so you can expect the form to be expanded to accomodate features like move history etc, but this should give you the broad-brush idea.

I was originally just going to have a simple line-drawn board, with filled circles for the cows, but I think this is much cooler and feels more like a real Morabaraba game! I have even added the concept of "wobbliness" to prevent the cows from lining up in unrealistic straight lines. I'll probably stop there for the next release, but I reckon it would be really simple to implement a "theme engine", allowing users to create/submit their own boards and pieces.

This weekend, I decided that for far too long now I've been avoiding thinking about a GUI for AHEM (Adam's Happy Electronic Morabaraba). I recently nailed the stupid backs that were causing the AHEM engine to segfault when compiled under Cygwin, and so I now have a single codebase which will compile cleanly for Linux and for Windows. Of course it's just command-line and therefore not much fun to play with, so it needs a GUI. In the back of my mind, I've been worrying away at some constraints:

• Same codebase must support Linux (at least KDE and Gnome) and Windows (and ideally MacOS X)
• Should ideally have a nice, fluffy IDE and debugger to simplify the graphics stuff
• Must easily be able to consume DLLs/SOs (so that the existing AHEM engine can be built into a library and used without changes to the engine)
• Must not impose significant software dependencies (this is what ruled out .NET/Mono) which complicate installation
• For preference, should not require me to learn (yet another) programming language
• Should be reasonably stable and well-documented

To be honest, I have made a number of false starts, using Visual Studio.NET, Kylix/Delphi, KDevelop and various others - but always one of these constraints would bring me up short. And it's annoying, because the AHEM v0.4 engine is so much better than the old .NET 0.1 version, but I have to keep that one up for download as it's the only one with a usable GUI. Sigh.