Why Am I Still Hacking This?

This weekend, I spent a bit of time working on Latrunculi and my wife asked me why I was working on it, rather than one of my more businessey ventures. Well, the short answer was that Latrunculi has been a labor of love for a long time now. It started as an exploratory project, meant as a way to learn some basic AI algorithms, while underemployed (not unemployed--when unemployed, I had no time for Latrunculi) and expanded beyond it to a much larger vision. The goal is for it to have bleeding edge AI with 3D graphics and an excellent user interface.

Latrunculi also represents a lot of growth for me. The initial work was done in Chicken Scheme (an excellent R5RS Scheme implementation, I might add) and is presently happening under CLISP. The switch was done because the SDL bindings were much more mature in Common Lisp. Additionally, I wearied of the ad-hoc way I had to assemble pieces of the Scheme language. Arrays? Vectors? Nope. They're in a SRFI, though. Modules? Not part of the language. And so on. Common Lisp has a much more practical bent to it as a language. Especially in the very first revisions, there is a lot of code that I am not proud of. The graphics code, especially, relied heavily on side effects and had a lot of poor variable names (brd for board). The number of set!s is simply revolting. It is coming together, though. A lot of the side effects have been cleaned up. On my personal git branch, I am starting to set up some unit tests. After a couple of things are done, we will have something resembling a real game, only with terrible AI (which is where I have been looking forward to being, again; I've read some papers and plan on doing a complete overhaul of the AI code).

Since the initial burst, work on Latrunculi has been sporadic. This is the project I do when the boys are napping (like that ever happens) and when all the house is quiet. It has always been that little spot of technical refuge from the grind in IT. Latrunculi is one of those embodiments of why I love this trade so. This idea of building something beautiful and, at the same time, usable is appealing. This week has been one of the longer ones at work, with a new project getting underway. It is after times like pounding on XML dumps and inventory reconciliations that the algorithmic challenges and graphics programming are so soothing.