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HEX: Eiffel Style. Created By: Rory Murphy Daniel Tyszka. The Project. We chose to implement the game which once used to be popular in the 60’s and 70’s. ( A Beautiful Mind ) Create a GUI for the game in which the user just has to click his or her way through a game.
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HEX: Eiffel Style Created By: Rory Murphy Daniel Tyszka
The Project • We chose to implement the game which once used to be popular in the 60’s and 70’s. (A Beautiful Mind) • Create a GUI for the game in which the user just has to click his or her way through a game. • Once the game was built, wanted to add networking support.
The Solution: EiffelVision and EiffelNet • GUI can be created easily with EiffelVision2. • Needed to draw the board and place a piece where the user clicks. • The ability to locate click events already exists. • Determine if a move is legal, if legal then place a piece, else handle the error and ask for another move.
The Solution Continued • For networking, use EiffelNet, a cross-platform (almost) library for handling sockets. • Hides the dirty work (we’re lazy) • Easy as writing to a text file (almost ) • For performance, send only a HEX_MOVE object. Allows for reusability of the code base, so a game being played at one console is not completely different than one being played over the network. • Determining a win also adds to the complexity of a game.
Results • Standalone game works perfectly. • The networking is not yet perfected, but it should be completed in the very near future (i.e. within a few days). • We have also seen a drastic rise in HEX addiction amongst friends.
Future Work • We originally planned on having either AI or Networking support, chose networking because we like to see fierce inter-human competition. • Creating an AI engine is somewhat challenging because it is not easily determined what move is “best”. • Since Hex can be played on different size boards, the strategy can be drastically different. • If the board is size 7, a move toward the center is not ideal, though if playing on a board of size 10, somewhere near the center is the “best”. • We have found some games online that have AI, and though it is a difficult problem for a computer, if a computer is given about 10 seconds to analyze moves it becomes nearly impossible for most people to win.
Got Hex? • Visit http://www.nd.edu/~dtyszka/hex.html to download a copy today. We will be making revisions to the code periodically. • We may make the game Open Source eventually too.