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Welcome to another issue of the Brave GNU World with a mixture of projects that should be able to provide one or two inspirations for most readers.

This month will also begin by introducing some Free Software games, of which there are obviously more than one would have thought at first.

Trophy

Andrew Mustun began developing Trophy [5] in March 2000 in order to fill the hole that quitting his computer science studies had left. Trophy is a car-racing game in 2D top-view, in which not only passing the finish line first matters.

More specifically, it is also about passing the finish line at all, since, similar to some James Bond movies, the cars are armed and also willing to make use of their gadgets.

Thanks to solid graphics and sound, Trophy is already a fairly complete game that should allow friends of action-heavy fun to enjoy themselves although a powerful computer is recommended for smooth scrolling.

Trophy was written in C++ and Andrew releases it under the GNU General Public License. Its biggest weakness is most likely the lack of a network play option. Andrew plans to take care of this once he finds time for it again, since right now his newly taken up studies keep him quite busy.

It should be noted that whilst preparing this article, Andrew did emphasize that he was a peace-loving individual who disapproves of guns in general and who also considers cars to be dangerous enough already without guns; although as he still lacks a driving license at 25, he couldn't drive a real car anyway.

That shouldn't take the fun out of wasting an entertaining afternoon with Trophy, though. If you seek creative relaxation in designing more tracks with GIMP in between races, that is not a problem. The instruction on how to do so are on the Trophy home page.

Should the network option be missed overly much, interested developers are of course welcome to implement it themselves. Andrew would definitely appreciate help in this direction.

Adonthell

The Adonthell project [6] is busy creating a Free 2D roleplaying game similar to the early consoles like the SNES, although it is intended to have a much higher degree of freedom.

Many games consist of two connected parts where each part can be understood individually. The importance of content like story, graphics, music and so on is immediately obvious. The technical component, which does the actual interfacing with the player, for instance, is commonly referred to as the "engine."

Usable analogies seem to be the relationship between programs and operating system or scores and musical instruments. This separation allows writing games in abstract form with language and possibilities determined by the engine.

The Adonthell project not only develops a game with a fixed story; rather, it develops an engine for roleplaying games along with stories that are being interpreted by this engine. It is planned to have all releases not only contain code fragments, but also complete little games.

Taking the usual fluctuation into account, the permanent team of Adonthell are Kai Sterker, Alexandre Courbot, James Nash, Benjamin Walther-Franks, Joel Vennin, Joseph Toscano and Mike Nieforth. Only three of these are programmers, the others are musicians, graphic artists or authors. Thanks to this combination and the fact that all members insist on meeting in person once a year, the game has a professional "feel" to it and gives a good example of a lively cooperation over the internet.

Code and graphics of Adonthell are released under the GNU General Public License. The programming language used for the engine is C++. For game control, expansions and in-game scripting, the Python interpreter was embedded into the engine. This makes it possible to write games for the Adonthell engine without ever touching C++. For music, OGG Vorbis [7] is being used.

One of the priorities was to be able to package engine and games separately. You only need to install the engine and with some help of tools like map- and dialog-editors as well as a little Python, it is possible to create a complete game.

To make this even more interesting, the Adonthell group also works on a complete world with its own history, customs and peculiarities.

Alexandre Courbot, who answered the Brave GNU World questionnaire, said the next step is to rewrite big parts of the code based on experience gathered.

The team is also still looking for people willing to help porting to other platforms. The game is known to run on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and BeOS, but in the long term, it is also planned to support proprietary operating systems in order to give their users a first taste of freedom.

Internally development is moving towards a more client/server based architecture to allow networked playing. Even though it isn't planned to support very large numbers of players, Adonthell should eventually be capable of allowing a medium number of players to interact in a persistant world.

Since its first steps in 1999, Adonthell has come a fair way already and further development provides hope for more. Those with the right skills who are too impatient to wait are encouraged to help the process along. The Adonthell team welcomes all kind of support. [8]

All others can already spend one or two afternoons with "Waste's Edge," the first playable release.

XBindKeys

Philippe Brochard wrote the program XBindKeys, [9] which makes it possible to assign shell commands to keys under X11. So frequently used programs like the mailer, browser or xterm can be launched without detour over the menu by a single key combination. Once one gets used to being able to do certain things without having to take the hands off the keyboard, one will not want to miss this capability.

Some window-managers support keybindings natively, but often not all keys are freely assignable - like special keys only present on some keyboards. Philip himself uses XBindKeys to bring up a shutdown menu when pressing the "power" key that his keyboard has.

Everyone who tries out new window managers or uses different window managers from time to time knows the problems associated with teaching the new window manager the favorite key combinations.

XBindKeys solves both problems, and in combination of the mini-program MoveMouse [10] also written by Philippe, it can even be used to bring the mouse to previously specified positions with a single keypress.

XBindKeys and MoveMouse both were written in C and are available under the GNU General Public License, because Philippe feels them to be his contribution to the GNU System.

The configuration of XBindKeys is done by directly editing the easily understood plain ASCII configuration file or using the GTK front end XBindKeys-Config [11] written by Laurent Vuibert.

As a side note it should be said that one should make sure XBindKeys gets started before the window manager; that ensures keypresses reach XBindKeys instead of being intercepted by the window manager.

There are no plans for further development since XBindKeys is stable and Philippe believes it should remain small and useful. This clearly sets a good example figthing the spreading "featureism."

Access Road

The area IT security is without question quite complex but important. Awareness of the possibility of bugs in programs is reasonably good by now, but it is also possible to create security problems by combining programs that are working and "bug free."

Complex environments and tasks sometimes require pretty complex and obscure information systems.

Without access limitations, data could be abused or modified secretly. The problem of this becomes immediately apparent when thinking about computer-based hospitals, for instance. The opposite, a complete limitation of all access, is also not a good idea since it makes all work impossible.

So the task at hand is to design a system in a way that useful and necessary usage is possible, while abuse becomes impossible.

Since the conception of such systems is done by humans, there is always a significant potential for error. Access Road [12] by Patrick Thazard tries to model the complex environment of information systems and visualize it for the administrator. That does not increase security in itself, but it offers help in finding security problems that may have gone unnoticed otherwise.

Patrick Thazard himself has been working as a computer security consultant since 1987 and wrote Access Road in Java under the GNU General Public License. The documentation is released under the GNU Free Documentation License.

At the moment Access Road supports GNU/Linux-like systems, simple routers and Solaris-like systems and even though no data update has been made before the last release, Patrick is convinced it will already provide a very useful structure for other developers.

Further plans including adding the interaction between GNU/Linux and Apache first, and then adding the interactions between operating system and the employed database management system. In the long-term perspective, expansions for modelling systems like CORBA or Windows 2000/XP should complete the system.

Until then there is still quite a bit of work to do and Patrick is looking for other developers willing to support his work. Even if the approach of graphical modelling in general does have some potential weaknesses, this project seems to be quite fascinating and allows exploration in new ways.

GNU Cons

GNU Cons [13] offers an alternative to one of the senior programs, GNU Make [14]. Anyone ever downloading software as source code to install it or just recompiled the Linux kernel has already used GNU Make simply by entering the command "make."

Make was written in a time when it was still normal to compile programs by hand or with Bash shell scripts and at the time it was a big step forward. But if you ever tried writing a Makefile yourself, you will most certainly have found the syntax to be pretty hard to understand. Which is why most developers copy working Makefiles from other projects to modify them for their current purpose or have Makefiles automatically generated by programs like GNU Automake.

On top of this, Make tries to detect modifications by the time of their last modification only, which is problematic and fails for sure when trying to recompile with new compiler options.

The name GNU Cons was chose because with its help programs can be "Cons-tructed" and its goal is to do the jobs done by GNU Make the way they should be done.

A very central component for this is a good mechanism to detect whether files have been modified. As a result, GNU Cons does not only look at modification times, but works with MD5 signatures of files, allowing a very good identification.

A good example for these capabilities is the behaviour of GNU Cons in the following scenario: the program "test" consists of the object files "test1.o, " "test2.o" and "test3.o."

After the first compilation of the program, the object file "test2.o" is damaged/corrupted deliberately. The next call of GNU Cons will rebuild "test2.o" and not cause relinking the program "test" again, since GNU Cons realized that the generated version of "test2.o" is identical to the one linked-in before.

Should GNU Cons be called with different compiler options, all parts are recompiled and linked, since not only the results but also the parameters used to create them are part of the comparison.

GNU Cons was written in Perl by Bob Sidebotham who has retired from working on it. Rajesh Vaidheeswarran and Steven Knight took over as maintainers of the stable (Rajesh) and development (Steven) versions. Being part of the GNU Project, GNU Cons is released under the GNU General Public License.

Thanks to using Perl, GNU Cons does run on Windows and Unix-derivates and its configuration files, the equivalent of the commonly used "Makefiles," allow using very dynamic and complex expressions to customize a program to a certain system as much as possible.

GNU Cons is fully usable although it is rather C/C++ heavy. Other programming languages can be accessed with the Cons::Plus module by Johan Holmberg. Also configuration files are of course rather Perl-heavy, which is not exactly a plus for many people.

At the end of this feature I would like to express my thanks to the GNU Cons team for coming up with extremely verbose answers to the Brave GNU World standard questions.

Rajesh Vaidheeswarran and Erich Waelde provided huge amounts of information with many examples, which was very interesting for me even if I was only able to put small parts of it into the issue. I can only hope some of the most important advantages got across well enough to give interested developers an idea of why they ought to give Cons a try.

SCons

The obvious similarities in name between GNU Cons and SCons [15] are not circumstantial. The design of SCons is largely based on GNU Cons and was written in August 2000 by Steven Knight, maintainer of the GNU Cons development version, for the Software Carpentry competition.

After being a maintainer of Cons for some time already, he pursued the goal of combining the ideas of Cons with the power of Python for the competition.

SCons is based on this work. Like Cons, it provides superior capabilities for detecting modifications and resolving dependencies, but its configuration files are based on Python. Also SCons already supports parallel compilation with the ability to specify the number of threads by commandline option.

SCons is still a fairly young project. The first alpha was released December 13th, 2001. That is why releases are still happening at very short intervals, often containing additional functions. So even though the project has been working with a strong regressive test-infrastructure to maintain backwards-compatibility and quality since day one, one may still experience roughness in everyday use.

The list of planned expansions is still rather long and contains not only good support for Java, C# and Fortran, but also the ability to generate documentation in several formats (PDF, PostScript, TeX and more) and archival.

SCons is being released under a X11-type of license, which is known not to protect the freedoms. It is possible that the GPL would have been the better choice for the long-term perspective, but SCons clearly qualifies as Free Software and taking a look at it or participating is clearly a good idea.

Finish

Alright, so much for the Brave GNU World of this month. For the next issue I already have one project stowed up that I'm already looking forward to introducing since it has my life much easier and I hope it'll do the same for you.

Until then I wish you all a good time and please don't hold back on suggestions, ideas, comments, feedback and project introductions; preferrably by email. [1]