New Ada ANSI console/X terminal game

[David Trudgett <wpower@zeta.org.au.nospamplease>]

Hi everyone,

For those who may be interested, I've just posted to my website a
first release (version 0.99) of my "High Seas Battleship" network
game. You can find the source code for it at:

http://www.zeta.org.au/~wpower/dkt/programs/high-seas-battleship.tar.gz

It's a full-screen colour text-based application written for Linux
console or xterm, but should work on most ANSI compatible terminal
devices. My program makes use of Samuel Tardieu's AdaSockets, which I
doubt works on Windows (the manual seems to mention only Unix and
OpenVMS), so I likewise doubt that High Seas will work as it is under
Windows, even assuming that there is a suitable ANSI terminal
available for Windows. It should be easy, however, to adapt the comms
layer to use a different sockets library, if desired.

For non-GNAT users, I should probably mention that the program uses a
GNAT specific library (in the main procedure, battleship.adb) to
access environment variables, so you'll probably want to replace this
with the relevant vendor-specific library, or perhaps
Ada.Command_Line.Environment (I didn't use it myself because GNAT
warned me that this is an internal GNAT package that therefore
shouldn't be used).

Besides AdaSockets and GNAT.OS_Lib just referred to, there are no
other dependencies except that you'll probably want a C compiler to
compile a couple of utility routines (which could probably be omitted,
though).

To compile under Linux/Unix, assuming you have GNAT and libadasockets
installed, you will probably just need to edit the Makefile and run
make.


The project was pursued simply as an Ada learning exercise, so
comments would be appreciated, if you have any.

Regards,

David


-- 

David Trudgett
http://www.zeta.org.au/~wpower/

Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning
people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as
applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to
improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of
their own. The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters,
and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon
human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set
themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their
views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end
justifies the means.

    -- Henry Grady Weaver (author), 
       (from The Mainspring of Human Progress)