HACKER

Hackers Only
------------

You're welcome to hack on any part of Filler, but these are the areas
that I am most interested in seeing advanced.

 * Better robot players. I believe it's possible to write a robot player
   which can beat almost all humans, even in Java. Note that all robot
   players should be tested to ensure that they terminate. I have had
   many instances where a robot player was in a position to win but
   insisted on choosing the wrong colour and hence the game could not
   finish.
 * Worse robot players. Bad robot players are needed as cannon fodder for the
   good robot players to help the ratings system work. They are also
   useful to pit against bad human players.
 * Better user interface. My GUI design skills are somewhat lacking,
   and someone with some artistic talent could do a nice job I'm sure.
 * Support for network play, i.e. a player at the other end of a TCP
   connection. It would be cool if the other end of the connection could
   be a robot player, and we could do some sort of Turing test :-).
 * Support for cyborg players, i.e. human players assisted by the
   robot algorithms.
 * Better support for human players, so that they could have names other
   than 'Human' and they could have different rankings.
 * Support for new players, who may not know what the heck is going on
   with all these computer players. It would be nice if the program
   could automatically choose a computer player to match or challenge
   their skill level.
 * Better configurability, so maybe you could change the 9 colours,
   and the game can remember the x,y location of the window and the
   current tournament rules. I would suggest keeping all this info in
   a Map and serialising it out to a file. At the very least, the game
   needs to be able to run in an alternate colours mode so that
   colour-blind people can play it.
 * Internationalisation. The code and Java support internationalisation,
   and all (hopefully) of the strings used in the game are in the file
   resources.properties, so internationalising will hopefully be a
   simple matter of producing new versions of the resource file. See the
   file INTERNATIONALISATION for more details.
 * A Windows installation. Although the code will run perfectly well on Windows,
   some Windows users who have Java will not know how to build the jar and run
   it, as 'make' doesn't come standard with Windows. It would be good to have
   the game packaged as an EXE which will install itself. I have added a windows
   target to the Makefile, which will at least make a batch file for Windows.
 * Put forward and back buttons on the help panel.
 * Make sure that all the right buttons and tabs are disabled. I think
   At the moment you can start a tournament while a tournament is 
   already in progress, and I don't know what will happen if you do that.
 * The tournament results are not well presented (e.g. if you are lucky, you
   get told who the winner was). It would be nice to have another panel where
   the tournament results are presented. (This idea came from Lang Sharpe.)
   
Coding Rules
------------

If you want your code to get into my code base, you'll need to follow these
rules, because I am very fussy. If I really like your ideas I will code them
myself, but that will take longer.

 * Follow the coding style (brackets, spaces, NO TABS). It is Sun's standard,
   so it is not too onerous.
 * Any strings which appear on the GUI must come from the resource file.

I hope you'll find the source code easy to understand and well
documented. I also hope you'll keep it that way if you add to it, because
if you don't I will, and I won't be happy about that. Please send
changes back to me (friendless@users.sourceforge.net), and I'll include
the ones I like.

Organisation
------------

The organisation of the source distribution is as follows:

 * src - the Java source code.
 * res - Java resources. Must go in your CLASSPATH if you are not running from
   the jar.
 * classes - created by the make command. Must go in your CLASSPATH if you are
   not running from the jar.
 * windows - the prebuilt Windows distribution.
 * other - an assortment of other files which are used in the build process, or
   are useful to developers.