Waking up a sleeping beauty

I have been interested in writing a boardgame in Ada for awhile. For this I could either start from scratch, or continue on something already existing.

AdaOthello

Looking at AdaOthello it appears to be a good way to get started. It was written 2001 by Adrian Hoe using GtkAda 1.2.12. With some minor effort I got it to build and run using GtkAda 2.1.14. It would probably been of less effort if I would have had some experience of GtkAda before.

Here it is up and running.

At the moment I find it quite easy to win over. As seen I have also taken all four corners.

Where to get it?

I have put the code in a bzr repository. To get it from there you can do:

shell> bzr branch http://gustaf.thorslund.org/src/adaothello/trunk adaothello

You can also get it from adaothello-0.1.1.tar.bz2

Building

gnat and GtkAda will be needed. On Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) they are available as gnat and libgtkada2.14.2-dev. I also found a bug in the packaging of libgtkada2-dev, see Launchpad bug 627059 for a workaround if you get problem building.

What is next?

• Write some more games
• Get the AI player better
• Put a project on Launchpad
• Use AWS too for UI
• Add LICENCE, README, NEWS, and INSTALL files.
• Write an about box
• ...

Why sleeping beauty?

Sleeping

• Latest version from 2001 so quite asleep I would say

Beauty

• The licence is GPL version 2 or later
• A licence that suits me
• The original author can be sure it will remain an open source project
• I had the freedom to wake it up
• I can be sure it will remain an open source project