02.OSS.Experience

Overview:
http://colossus.sourceforge.net/
Colossus is a Java clone of the boardgame Titan, a turn-based fantasy wargame for 2-6 players. Each player moves stacks of creatures around a strategic board, recruiting more creatures and fighting enemy stacks on tactical maps.

Original Titan game information can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(game)

Prime Directive 1:
Did this application/system successfully accomplish a useful task?
I would be inclined to say "yes". I've never played the Titan game, but overall this game looks/feels pretty good. This game accomplished the task of holding my attention for a lengthy duration of time. Frustration drove me to figure out how to win. I will also be gracious enough to say that I would at least play this game one more time after posting the required journal entry in my Engineering blog.

Playing against "Simple AI" proved to be the best way to learn the basics of the game and develop elementary strategy. In a nutshell, the game functions in very similar fashion to another board game which you might have heard of called Risk. In Colossus, however, instead of incorporating the usual Risk strategy of boxing yourself in one has to develop multidimensional attacking stratagems to survive. Movement and coordinated attack are significantly rewarded. I had to search for useful strategies on the internet to save time (it's not fun to lose to "Simple AI"). I managed to find a few useful ideas on the Titan Wikipedia page mentioned above.

Prime Directive 2:
Do I believe an external user could successfully install and use the game?
If the user is able load all the files into Eclipse and "Run Application," then I believe he/she has all the necessary tools to run this game. I did not need to download any 3rd party modules/plugins, everything was self contained. This was not the case for many other open source game projects I tried to load before stumbling upon this one. I went through eight open source games, each of which gave me a headache. As far as I could tell, installation support was nonexistent. I did manage to get one other game running easily. However, all the documentation was in Russian.

It took roughly 30 seconds to get the Colossus application up and running. This was a huge plus for me. I suspect that once I receive additional training in Java, I will not have such a hard time making the red error marks in Eclipse go away.

Prime Directive 3:
Can an external developer successfully understand and enhance the system?
Colossus has great user documentation when it comes to playing the game and understanding the controls. It also has great support for potential developers. The Colossus team maintains a forum on http://sourceforge.net/projects/colossus/forums/ which serves as a conduit for getting information about the source. They also have mailing lists that one can subscribe to (colossus-developers) for discussion of design and coding issues.

http://colossus.sourceforge.net/docs/index.html also provides another source of documentation and support. Developers can reference this link to learn things like:

• Building Colossus
• Coding standards
• Variant-HOWTO
• File formats
• Split prediction
• Network design
• New savegame / network events
• Adding a marker set

The Java documents associated with the source code are self explanatory. I feel that even as a complete novice with no UML diagram, I would still be able to pick my way through their code and implement new functionality.