# Copyright (c) 2000 John Stracke <fanorona@thibault.org>
#
# This file is part of Fanorona.
#
# Fanorona is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
# under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
# Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later
# version.
#
# Fanorona is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
# ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See
# the GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
# with program; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307,
USA.
Fanorona for GNOME (not "GNOME Fanorona", since it isn't part of the GNOME games package) is an implementation of Fanorona, a classic board game from Madagascar. For details on how Fanorona is played, see the online help.
The AI player is pretty basic: it looks ahead a specified number of steps and picks out the best move. "Best" is defined as "leading to the board with greatest value", where "value" is the number of pieces the AI has left minus the number of pieces the human has left. If there are more than one move leading to the same maximum value, the AI picks one at random. This leads one odd quirk: if the human player has one piece left, which the AI could take immediately, and the human cannot escape, then the AI will see that all of its possible moves are equally valuable, and just start picking at random; it may take the last piece right away, or it may dither around for a bit first.
The number of steps ahead the AI player looks can be set in the preferences. The default is 3, which lets the AI play pretty well, and doesn't take too long. It can be set as high as 10, but more than 5 is probably going to be prohibitively slow.
The game is internationalized. So far, we have localizations for Spanish, Japanese, French, German, and Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar). (I did the German translation myself, and my German's pretty rusty, so please let me know if I messed up.) If you want to do a translation, see the instructions in LOCALIZING.txt (not included in the binary RPM).
Version 1.1.1 dumbs down the FLTK version a bit so it'll run faster on the Agenda. It's still adequately challenging (it can beat me, at least), but it's much more playable.
Version 1.1 adds an FLTK implementation, which can be compiled for the Agenda VR3 handheld. For instructions, see INSTALL. The user interface is a subset of the GNOME interface, so I haven't provided separate documentation.
Version 1.0 makes the size of the window persistent; that is, if you resize the game, it will remember that size the next time it runs.
Version 0.7.0 fixes some problems that were keeping it from building on Mandrake, and that were keeping the RPM target in the Makefile from working if you were building from the distributed tarball (I'd only ever tried building from my own CVS tree).
Version 0.6.2 adds Malagasy; version 0.6.1 gives the board a slightly nicer appearance (the lines are mitred, ooh ahh); version 0.6.0 adds the ability to save the game, and shows the user which spaces they've already moved through this turn (since you aren't allowed to cross back over your path).