Collaborator(s) sought to port WxWindows games

[Graham Wheeler <gram cdsec com>]

Hi all

I am the author of a couple of shareware programs for Windoze written
using Julian Smart's wxWindows. These programs are:

WordsWorth - a generalised Scrabble game. By generalised, I mean the
	game is highly configureable, with the board size, layout, 
	letter frequencies and scores, and some of the rules, all
	being modifiable.

XWord - a crossword solving assistant. XWord allows you to enter crossword
	grids, plus some additional constraints (e.g. if you know that a
	particular word is an anagram of some other word, you can 
	specify this). XWord then uses its dictionary to continually
	calculate the possible words that can fit the partially completed
	grid. As the cursor is moved around the grid, the possible
	down/across words and letters are displayed. XWord can sometimes
	complete crosswords where not much more than 50% of the words have
	been filled in. It also makes solving crosswords much easier (I
	have managed to use it to complete some difficult cryptic crosswords
	that I would otherwise not have got more than about a quarter done).

	Xword also uses a `word-web' based on Roget's Thesaurus for 
	assitional constraints - these are very useful for crosswords
	with single-word clues.

Both programs also have powerful dictionary consulting features, for
pattern-matching, and single or multi-word anagram generation.

The Windoze versions of the programs are available on Simtel in the
win95/edu directory, if anyone wants to look at them.

I would like to support the GNOME project initiative by making GNOME
versions of these programs freely available. However, I don't have the
time or the skill set at this stage to do this myself. So I thought I
would post this message to the list, and see if there are any GNOME 
app programmers out there who might be interested in porting the sources
to GTK+/GNOME. 

The GUI aspects are probably not that complex; the programs were originally
written for DOS text mode, then ported to DOS graphics, and then to wxWindows,
so there is a fairly clean separation of user interface from the underlying
game engines (when I did the wxWindows ports I tried to increase this
separation with the idea, never realised, of making Web based versions as
well).

Should anyone be willing to do this, I would like them to sign NDAs for the
original wxWindows source code, to protect my intellectual rights over the
Windoze versions. However, once the ports are done, I would be willing to
release the GNOME version source code under the GPL. I don't think this
should be a problem - I'm a UNIX head, and believe that UNIX heads should
get good software for free, but people who use Windoze should pay for their
crime! ;-)

If anyone is interested, let me know...

BTW, both programs in turn are built on a simple `games application 
framework' that I wrote, which encompasses the bulk of the user interface
in a few components - the Game Frame, Game Canvas, Game Menu, and Game Panel.
The GAF (as I called it) includes a test program which implements several
simple board games like Tic-Tac-Toe and Othello, using minimax with
alpha-beta pruning. So that would also be a candidate. The old DOS code
even included a Go game (based loosely on AmiGo), but I never got as far
as moving that to wxWindows.

ciao
g.
-- 
Dr Graham Wheeler                          E-mail: gram@cdsec.com
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