The History Game: World Mapping

Software	Java or C++ or Smalltalk or another object oriented language with good GUI facilities and graphics packages
Covers	GUI building, algorithm design, non-mathematical graphics
Skills Required	Programming, some interest in graphics, some interest in geography
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ??? Programming ????

Brief Description

The History Game (idea borrowed from Civilization™): You are a leader of a nomadic tribe at the dawn of history. Your mission is to guide your people to greatness, as your society grows, develops and meets other competing tribes in trade and war. You have to respond to famines, epidemics, climate changes, invasions and technological developments in your quest to achieve ultimate world domination.

The objective of the project is to develop a game module to build the foundation of all history: a world to live in. The module should create maps of areas of different sizes (ideally the entire globe if required). It should be able to amend the map as required (by the spread of people of different tribes, the development of agriculture, roads and cities, climate changes, cataclysmic geological events). The module should be designed to embody a clean separation between the map creation operations and the geographical knowledge driving the design of the world, so that the geographical decision making operations can be extended or varied without changing the core system. The project should include the implementation of simple demonstrator geographical decision making submodules, but these don't need to be very sophisticated; however the implementation of more sophisticated world designing procedures will be given due credit. The project should also include a screen display of the map, preferably including a facility for zooming in and out on particular regions and a well chosen coding scheme for different types of terrain. Ideally this would include an interactive user interface to permit the leader of the civilisation to take actions like founding cities or growing crops directly on the map.

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