An intelligence competition for Lisp developers

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 return what to do next. The feebs are creatures that live in mazes. They are able to throw letal flames that transforms feebs into carcass. Everyone also need food, so they can eat mushrooms that sometimes show up in the maze or carcasses from other killed feebs.

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...)
• Source code for displaying graphics is quite complex (almost written in C!) with no great reason but speed.
• 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, the objective 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. To be more specific, these are our goals:

• Portability. The Feebs War should work whenever the graphic packages work.
• Better graphics, using Lispbuilder's SDL graphic package.
• Full documentation: a complete and direct-to-the-point manual and an easy-to-understand tutorial.
• Implementation of some features that the manual of Planet of The Feebs points but its 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. Documentation about this feature is also planned.
• Full support for newbies to install, run and play the game.
• Any good ideias that you have; please do not hesitate and send it to the Announcements Mailing List (see below).

To use the package you will need to install ASDF.

Download the current version of The Feebs War and extract it. Then put a symbolic link of the file the-feebs-war.asd somewhere under your asdf:*central-registry*. Refer to ASDF's homepage for more information. Next, invoke the following command under your Common Lisp implementation:

(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op 'the-feebs-war)

To see a game before creating your own feeb, do:

(feebs:simple-play)

Then refer to the documentation to learn how to define you own feeb.

There is a manual (in PDF) that explains the rules of the game.

• The-Feebs-War-devel
  Development. If you find any bugs, or want to send patches or suggestions, please subscribe for this list.
• The-Feebs-War-svn
  All commits that are made to the repository are reported in this list.
• The-Feebs-War-users
  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.

Some bugs were fixed. You can download the current version, released on March, 15th, 2008. For now there is just a text-graphics version. I hope this is enough for anyone curious about the project. I don't recommend this package to be installed by someone who is trying to learn something right now. Bug reports are allways welcome!

Gustavo Henrique Milaré.

If you want to help the project, join the Development Mailing List.

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