Get involved in block'em

Go ahead, make my day

The beauty of free software (free as in freedom) is that everybody can use, see and change the software. Block'em is free software and as such you are entitled to have a look at its sources, but also to change them and actively partipate in it!

Good news is, block'em is quite far from being finished. There are a lot of things yet to be done. Some of them are described in the TODO list section, but some others are yet to be discovered by random users and programmers.

If you have a new feature request (doesn't really matter how crazy it might look, this project is driven by fun) or if you want to actively participate in Block'em, all you will have to do is dropping me an e-mail, and tell me about your ideas, requests, suggestions... I will be very glad to help.

Alternatively to the old e-mail way, you can submit your bug or feature request in sourceforge. Either way your messages will get to me.

The (always growing) TODO list

After all, tomorrow is another day!

Don't take this section too serious. This is just a list of things that once crossed over my mind and I would be very glad to see in block'em. If you have any interest in participating in this project, pick the one you like the most and start working on it. If you need any help contact me and I will answer as soon as I can.

Also, if you think something should be added to the big TODO list here, let me know.

New features

• Write new AI schemes for 1vs1 games. If you are interested have a look at the AI section in the developers area.
• AI for 4 players games
• Improve GUI appearance. For example, depth is a very technical parameter, far from what a good user interface should look like.
• At the moment the application is on hold while the human user is thinking of the next move. This time could be used by the AI engine to start calculating next move.
• Keep track of all the moves made during the game so that it could be possible to go backwards in time to explore or change past moves.
• Save current games to be able to resume the game later on.
• There is some work done on bitwise representation of boards and pieces because it looked like it could improve performance, but hasn't been finished yet.
• AI algorithm is not multithreaded, though building up a search tree looks like a good (and relatively easy) thing to be multithreaded.
• Add a way to mark which challenges are 'completed' by the user.

Packaging and distribution

• The application has been succesfully ported to windows, but it is distributed using a zip file which is supposed to be decompressed by the user. It would be nice to have the typical windows installer.
• Create a RPM package for blockem (should be easy using the .deb as a reference).
• Block'em has only been ported to GNU/Linux and Windows, but it should compile in every platform supported by GTKmm. Would be nice to check where it compiles, and what are the changes needed in code for blockem to work properly in those platforms.

Internationalisation

• According to Ethnologue there are 6909 living languages in the world. But Block'em is only available in two languages: English and Spanish. Wouldn't you like block'em in your own language? Have a look at the internationalization section in the developers area.

Documentation

• The code as been written keeping doxygen comment style in mind. It would be nice to have the documentation generated by it available for developers.
• The script used to profile the execution of blockem is based on gprof. Would be nice to check cachegrind.
• It would be really nice to have some sort of help embedded in the blockem application. Especially for the rules of the game.