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written in Scheme, as implemented by Guile.">
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<H1>GNU Robots</H1>
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<P><B>What's new:</B>
<P>7/15/00: <A HREF="mailto:tim@pnorthover.freeserve.co.uk">Tim Northover</A>
has agreed to become the new maintainer of GNU Robots!.
Please send all new patches to Tim.
<P>6/25/00: Version 1.0D of GNU Robots has been checked into CVS on the
GNU server! You can
<A HREF="http://www.gnu.org/software/devel.html#CVSBrowse">browse the
GNU CVS repository</A> using CVSWeb or using Anonymous CVS access.
<P><B>Current release is:
<A HREF="http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gnurobots/gnurobots-1.0D.tar.gz">GNU Robots 1.0D</A></B>
<P>To build, you will also need to have a recent copy of
<A HREF="http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/guile/">GNU Guile</A>
<HR>
GNU Robots is a game/diversion where you construct a program for a
little robot, then watch him explore a world. The world is filled
with baddies that can hurt you, objects that you can bump into, and
food that you can eat. The goal of the game is to collect as many
prizes as possible before are killed by a baddie or you run out of
energy. GNU Robots (including source) will be released under the GNU
<a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">General Public License.</a>
<p>The GNU Robots playing field is filled with food (increases
energy), prizes (to increase your score), walls (which you can bump
into), and baddies (which can inflict damage.)
<p>To make the program easier to design and implement, I have
decided to let the robot program be written in a text file, so that
advanced programmers don't have to limit themselves to a visual
programming interface. The language will be Scheme, which provides
for flexibility in writing your programs. For non-programmers,
there will also be a visual programming interface, which will
generate Scheme code.
<p>GNU Robots uses <A HREF="/software/guile/guile.html">GNU Guile</A>
as the language back-end (Scheme). This will make the GNU Robots game
engine more consistent with other GNU projects, as it will use the
same extension language.
<p>For a list of features that will find its way into GNU Robots,
please see the <A HREF="plan.html">release plan</A>.
<P>For a list of current features, please see the
<A HREF="readme.html">documentation</A>.
<p>Answers to your other questions will be found in the
<A HREF="faq.html">FAQ</A>.
<P>If you would like to help with GNU Robots, please read my
<A HREF="todo.html">to do</A> list.
There is really one key missing piece in GNU Robots: I had
originally envisioned a "visual" programming interface for GNU
Robots, one where you could create a robot program by dropping into
place icons that represent the robot's actions. There would be one
icon to tell the robot to move forward, another to have him turn to
the left or right, and another to have him pick up things or fire
his little gun.
<P>This programming interface would really just act as a kind of code
generator; it would write a Scheme program that you could then load
into GNU Robots. Writing this in GTK+ would seem like a good idea.
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Return to <A HREF="http://www.gnu.org/home.html">GNU's home page</A>.
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Please send FSF & GNU inquiries & questions to
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There are also <A HREF="http://www.fsf.org/about/contact.html">other ways to
contact</A> the FSF.<P>
Please send comments on these web pages to
<A HREF="mailto:tim@pnorthover.freeserve.co.uk"><EM>tim@pnorthover.freeserve.co.uk</EM></A>,
send other questions to
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Copyright © 1998,1999,2000 Jim Hall.
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Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is
permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
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Updated:
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$Date: 2006/11/24 08:25:37 $ $Author: ramprasadb $
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