Boardgames

Kandidatarbete at CTH by Jennifer Krogh, Mattias Mattsson, Emma Pettersson, Simon Sundqvist, Carl Wiede, and Mårten Åsberg.

Project description/proposal (in Swedish)

Group page (access restricted)

Description

A library with the basis for modeling and playing boardgames. Comes with built-in functions for playing games through a web interface (requires WASM compilation).

Development

We use cabal for development.

The library is located in ./src. During development cabal repl <path/to/file> can be useful to test new features of the library.

A example executable is located in ./executable. Use cabal run boardgame to test it.

A test suite is located in ./tests. Use cabal test to run it.

UI Development

The UI side of this project is targeting the web by compiling the Haskell code to WASM with Asterius.

Setup

The easies way to use Asterius is with their prebuilt Docker container, here is how you do it:

1. Firstly you need to install Docker, just follow the instructions from Docker docs.
2. Once Docker is up and running, run the Asterius container with the following command

   docker run -it -v $(pwd):/workspace -w /workspace terrorjack/asterius

   Where $(pwd) is the absolute path to this directory. Docker will mount this directory to the "workspace", where you can use all the Asterius commands.
3. The first time you use the container you must "boot" Asterius, it is also a good idea to update cabal. Do that with these commands:

   ahc-boot && ahc-cabal new-update

   Together they take about 20 minutes, and then you ready.

Building

Well up and running, you should use ahc-cabal instead of cabal to compile the project, we've also have a flag for activating the WASM features. Building the executable should look like this now:

ahc-cabal new-build exe:boardgame --flags="wasm"

But building targeting WASM doesn't actually get us anything useful. To transform the output to .wasm and .js you can use ahc-dist. Run the following command:

ahc-dist --browser --bundle \
	--input-exe path/to/boardgame \
	--output-directory /absolute/path/to/existing/out-directory

The --input-exe is the path to the output of building the project, it's probably dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-linux/ghc-8.8.4/boardgame-0.1.0.0/x/boardgame/opt/build/boardgame/boardgame from the root of the project.

In your output directory you'll now find boardgame.wasm and boardgame.js, and an example HTML file boardgame.html showing how to use them. Open boardgame.html in a web server (can't load WASM from a local file), open the console in your web browser, and play around with the window.boardgame object.

If you wish to have a UI to play around with, you can mode the boardgame.wasm and boardgame.js files over to the example of the boardgame.js repo.