Exceptionally Uncaught

Last week Stilly suggested that it would be a good idea for me to have a got at the Hackfest. I'd originally looked at it and thought "nah, to hard", but after his suggestion I took another look and figured I could give it a go. If nothing else, it will give me some good coding practice.

For anyone to lazy to click on the link, this year’s hackfest involves an old game called Spellcast. Basically you have two wizards throwing spells at each other until one gives up or dies. There are two parts of hackfest - the first is to write a bot (get the computer to play one of the wizards) and the second is to write a GUI for the game (or at least a better GUI).

My first thought was to go for the GUI version - I figured there would be less people entering, and I've always wanted to get some graphics skills. But then I came up with a good idea for the bot, so maybe I'll try for both. Or maybe I'll end up with nothing. I guess we'll see...

My first challenge was getting the source code to compile. After a weekend of downloading and installing packages (including acidently deleting some very important packages and having to re-install Ubuntu - thanks Grant), I got no where. After getting some help from Stilly, I discovered that I had actually managed to get the game to compile, I was just to dumb to get it to run.

So now I have a working version of Spellcast. Now all I have to do is start writing some code...

# posted by Simon Dugard @ 9:36 am