Resources

General Game AI

• Reviews of game AI
• AI Game Programmers Guild
• AIGameDev.com
• GitHub code repository for obsolete code from the first edition of AI for Games textbook

Writing Intensive

• UH Manoa Writing Center has free tutoring for your writing (appointments recommended). During the covid-19 pandemic, UHMWC is offering Online tutoring.
• grammaryly.com is a good resource for fixing your grammar mistakes and checking for accidental plagiarism.
• Proofreader's Glossary by McGraw Hill.
• Get it Write Online explains very well the difference between Which or That?
• GrammarBook.com lists rules for when to use Commas

Oral Focus

• AACU Oral Communication VALUE Rubric is the rubric we will be using in class to grade oral presentations.
• Prezi is a free presentation software that works really well for modular, chronological, physical, spatial, matrix, and parallel tracks type flow structures.

BZFlag

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition (VS for short) is the official IDE for Bzflag on Windows. Download it and check the box for "Desktop development with C++" before installing it. For Mac users, Xcode works fine for me (follow the instructions in README.MacOSX). When you start Visual Studio on bzflag.sln (see next bullet) for the first time, answer yes to upgrading to the latest version of the Windows SDK. If it does not ask, you may have to right click on "Solution 'bzflag'" and select "Retarget solution".
• For installing bzflag on Windows, dowload the source code, version 2.4.18 from bzflag's Downloads page and follow the instructions in the README.WINDOWS file. The VS solution file is in MSVC\fullbuild.sln (double click it to start VS). The README.WINDOWS file tells you to install the NSIS 3.03, so do that first. Also you may need the BZFlag dependencies. Either clone the GitHub project or download it. Then build it by running buildVC2017.bat (Windows) or buldmacOS.sh (Mac). Note that you may have to edit the buildVC2017.bat file to change all instances of PlatformToolset=v141 to PlatformToolset=v142 and change all instances of 10.0.16299.0 (Windows SDK version) to whatever version of Windows SDK you are currently running (start up VS on bzflag-dependencies-master\src\regex\regex.sln, then right click on "Solution 'regex' (1 project)" on the left pane and select "Retarget solution" to see your Windows SDK Version choices). Also in buildVC2017.bat, change the line "set outputroot=%origroot%output-windows-%CONF%-%ARCH%" to "set outputroot=%origroot%output-%CONF%-%ARCH%" (i.e., delete "-windows") since BZFlag expects the directory name without the -windows. Note that SDL2 failed to build for me. I successfully built it with buildVC2017.bat by downloading the latest source code version of SDL2 and replaced the SDL2 folder in the bzflag-dependencies-master\src folder with the downloaded SDL2-2.0.10 folder (see below if this does not work for you). Here is my version of buildVC2017.bat with Windows SDK version 10.0.18362.0 and a fix to a line missing double-quotes around a folder specification. After successfully building the dependencies, set the environment variable BZ_DEPS to point to the full path to your bzflag-dependencies-master directory (see Architect Ryan's How to change environment variables on Windows 10).
• If buildVC2017.bat (modified version) does not work to build SDL2 for you, build it in Visual Studio, then copy the appropriate files to bzflag-dependencies-master. There is a VisualC directory in SDL2 where you can double-click on SDL.sln and then build SDL2 in Visual Studio. After building, copy the VisualC\Win32\Debug\*.lib (should be 3 files, SDL2.lib, SDL2main.lib and SDL2test.lib) to your bzflag-dependencies-master\output-debug-x86\lib directory. Also copy the Release versions to output-release-x86\lib. Next copy SDL2\VisualC\Win32\Debug\SDL2.dll to bzflag-dependencies-master\output-debug-x86\bin. Do the same for Release\SDL2.dll to output-release-x86\bin. Finally copy the SDL2\include directory into bzflag-dependencies-master\output-debug-x86\include as SDL2. Repeat for output-release-x86.
• If when debugging bzflag or bzfs, you get an error about some .dll file not found and that file is in your bzflag-dependencies-master\output-debug-x86\bin directory, then you will need to add that to your PATH environment variable for BZFlag. One way to do this is to right click on bzflag, select Properties, then Debugging and add under Environment, PATH=%PATH%;$(BZ_DEPS)\output-debug-x86\bin (replace debug with release if you are running a release version). If you are running bzflag or bzfs from a Command Prompt, you will need to run PATH=%PATH%;$(BZ_DEPS)\output-debug-x86\bin (again replace debug with release if you are running the release version) before running bzflag or bzfs from the Command Prompt.
• If you get this error: The Windows SDK version ... was not found. Install the required versio of Window SDK or change the SDK version in the project property pages or by righ-clicking the solution and selecting "Retarget solution". Just follow the instruction by right clicking on "Solution to 'bzflag' ..." and then select "Retarget solution".
• If you get the error "No fonts found (the -directory option may help). Exiting", try right clicking on bzflag, select "Properties" at the bottom of the popup menu, then under Debugging, add Command Arguments: -directory full-path-to-your-bzflag-2.4.18\data
• If you are running a server on the same machine as your client and you cannot connect to your server via the "Find Server" menu in bzflag with an alphabetic host name like "localhost" (seems to happen on the UHM wireless network), try typing in the numeric IPv4 address for the server (on Windows, you can look up your IP address by running cmd.exe and typing "ipconfig", then look for the IPv4 Address, which should be something like 168.105.83.87). The numeric address 127.0.0.1 is equivalent to "localhost" and this may work for you, so you can avoid calling ipconfig to get the actual IP address.
• To run bzflag with robots, add "-solo N" without the double-quotes where N is the number of robot tanks to the command line or to Configuration Properties: Debugging: Command Arguments for debugging bzflag. If you are running on a single screen and cannot control-tab out of bzflag to your Visual Studio window, add "-window 640x480" to the same Command Arguments.
• If when compiling bzflag, you get a link error involving regfree, regex, regcomp, regerror, regexec, etc., try adding regex.lib to bzflag's Properties: Configuration Properties: Linker: Input: Additional Dependencies. Also add $(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\regex_Win32_Debug to bzflag's Properties: Configuration Properties: VC++ Directories: Library Directories. You can also use the full path, but if you ever move or copy the bzflag-2.4.2 directory, you will have to remember to change these values.
• If you have a multiprocessor CPU, you can set bzflag's Properties: Configuration Properties: C/C++: General: Multi-processor Compilation to "Yes (/MP)" for faster compilation.
• If you get an error in common\OSFile.cxx about "C220 the following warning is treated as an error" followed by "C4834 discarding return value of function with 'nodiscard' attribute", then change lines 737-746 of the file to:

  bool OSDir::linuxAddFileStack(std::string pathName, std::string fileMask, bool bRecursive)
  {
  #ifdef _WIN32
      // quell warnings
      if (!bRecursive)
      {
          static_cast<void>(fileMask.size());
          static_cast<void>(pathName.size());
      }
      return false;
  

• To run bzfs, run "bzfs -conf configuration_file_name.conf" in a cmd.exe window in the directory bzflag-2.4.18\bin_Debug_Win32 (replace Debug with Release if you are running the release version). You can also run it from within Visual Studio.