The Feebs War

Introduction

Learn Lisp playing! The Feebs war is a game in which players are Lisp developers. Each player controls a feeb, not directly, but by providing a behavior function. Such function must receive what the feeb is seeing, feeling and then it must decide what to do next. The feebs are creatures that live in mazes; they are able to throw letal flames that transforms feebs into carcass; they also need to eat, so they can eat mushrooms that sometimes show up in the maze, or carcasses from other killed feebs.

About the Project

The Feebs War project has its inspiration and source code based on Planet of The Feebs. Someone that already used that package could have noticed that it has many problems. These are some of them:

• The Project is somewhat old, not maintained and has no support.
• There is only a black-and-white display version for X Window System used with CMUCL.
• Many features pointed by the documentation that are not supported by the code. (e.g. (get-maze-map) function, the way to define a feeb...)
• There are about 2000 lines of code in a single file! (Well, probably there wasn't ASDF at that time, poor boys)
• Source code for displaying graphics is quite complex (almost written in C!) with no great reason but speed. (nowadays, not necessary)
• Whenever someone makes a feeb brain, he or she needs to test for every single element of the map if it is a single element or a list of elements.
• No help for lisp newbies, although the project is mainly directed to them.

Off course, hte intentions of this project is not to criticise the developers of the original game, but rather to enhance their work and make it more flexible, correcting these mistakes. These are our goals, and, when they are totally achieved, then, and only then, the version 1.0 of The Feebs War will be released:

• Portability, working, at least, for Clisp, CMUCL and SBCL.
• The graphics will be displayed using portable, colorfull and beautifull Lispbuilder's graphics package. Anyone who have some images of his/her feeb will be able to use them!
• A compatible, more complete and direct-to-the-point manual.
• Implementation of some features that the original manual points but the code doesn't have.
• Addition of many parameters and subtraction of others that are not necessary.
• Rules defined in a extensible and understandable way, so that anyone can check, change them or even create new rules.
• Full support for newbies to install, run and play the game. For example, a function that can be directly called and that shows a complete game running, so people can feel the game before playing.
• Any good ideias that you have; please do not hesitate and send it to the Announcements Mailing List (see below).

Mailing Lists

• The-Feebs-War-devel
  Development. If you find any bugs, or want to send patches or suggestions about the source code, please subscribe for this list.
• The-Feebs-War-cvs
  CVS log feed. All commits that are made to the repository are reported in this list. Also, if you have made a feeb and want it to be available, or if you want to challenge someone for a battle, just join this list.
• The-Feebs-War-announce
  Announcements. If you want to know about the project, news, releases, or if you have suggestions, comments, ideas, questions... fell free to subscribe for this list.

You are free to join any of these lists at any time.

Download

This project has not released any files yet. But something might be available in nothing more than two weeks. You may write it in a paper and complain with me otherwise (in any mailing list).

Project members

Gustavo Henrique Milare.

If you want to help the project (for example, making a better home page for the project), just join the Development Mailing List without compromises.

CVS

This project uses Subversion (svn) repositories. You can browse our Subversion repository or download the current development tree via anonymous svn, invoking:

 svn checkout svn://common-lisp.net/project/the-feebs-war/svn