A slightly off topic question for Alessandro

[Michael Sherwin]

Hi Alessandro,

I have been a fan of the game Risk ever since I was a kid, which was a long long time ago. And even before I decided to write a chess engine and before there was a winboard I envisioned what today I would call Riskboard with the ability for people to write risk engines for it. I would have written Riskboard myself if I thought that it was possible for me to have been successful. My question to you, since you are very familiar with winboard is this. How much different do you think the aproach would have to be to write Riskboard and do you have any insight to offer in the creation of such a program? If there is interest in Riskboard then I could try to write it, but, if someone else would write it then it would become available much sooner than what I could do. Any thoughts?

Moderators, If this is to off topic, please feel free to delete.

Thanks,
Mike

[Michael Yee]

I think a Risk protocol is a great idea! I've often wondered how to approach the AI for games like Settlers of Catan and Risk and I'm guessing that others here have too. A common protocol and gui would make experimenting much easier.

By the way, there's an existing open source risk game called jrisk:

http://jrisk.sourceforge.net/
http://jrisk.sourceforge.net/makeai.htm

Reusing most of the graphical parts of that project would make creating the "RiskBoard" GUI pretty easy (I think).

There's also an open source settlers of catan clone called pioneers:

http://pio.sourceforge.net/

Michael

[Alessandro Scotti]

Hello Michael,
I am a Risk fan myself and I think you have a great idea there!
However, I feel I have no advice to give, as I never considered something like that and it looks quite different from what I have done with Winboard.
Generally speaking, I think Java would be well suited for this project and at least for a while I would not even consider doing graphics at all.
A look at the JRobots project may be useful, it seems to have good "engine" management even allowing upload of new robots "on the fly":

http://jrobots.sourceforge.net/