Update 28-May-’01: The Source for the project has been posted

That sounds like a fun game doesn’t it? Well that was our project description for our Software Engineering Project module. Needless to say its a bit fuzzy and a touch on the random side, but after a bit of research I came up with the following:

• WikiGolf is a game where you start off on a random page on wikipedia, (using the random page function). You then try to get to a predetermined finishing page in a set number of clicks. To do this you can only click on links in the main article. You can’t use the search function etc.
• The graph traversal part is done by moving through the graph of all the links on wikipedia. Somebody already trawled the links and we’re given a graph of all the links in a file which we have to read. For example the wikipedia page for Sex links to all of the following pages.

sex: gender male female sexorgan vagina prostate gender identity karyotype transvestism crossdressing discrimination sex segregation sexism reproduction sexual_intercourse

We have to use these links to construct a graph and traverse it.

• Game. Well it has to be fun to play….

So there you have it. Its kind of esoteric, but I think we’ve managed to get a good grip on it. So with that in mind, we set about forming our groups and making a plan.

The first 6 weeks of the module were based around doing practicals to get us a base level of code. Some with which we could work on to make to game. We started by writing a program that would create a graph of nodes with links to other nodes, as well as some basic operations on the graph. Then we modified it to be able to read the contents of a file. We finished with being able to find the shortest path between two points on the graph. Once we had those practicals done it was time to move on to the rest of the project.

Having formed our teams, everybody started having meetings, and devising how they wanted their game to look and play. The reason I’m writing this now is that we just finished our meeting to decide exactly how the game should look and feel. Everything will be done in Java, so we went with Swing, as it seems to be the easiest to learn. I managed to find some simple WYSIWYG editors in the group who aren’t too into coding everything from scratch like me.

I’m rather happy with how things are going at the moment. I managed to get pretty much the entire back-end working over the mid term break, so now everybody is just working on the GUI, and trying to get it to look pretty. Once the entire thing is done, I’ll try and post a copy of the program up here (if my team doesn’t object).