hello guys, below is a direct cut and patse from my post at the game design forum, a guy over there suggested i post here instead.. hi, i lurk here alot but rarely post, my last post was like 3,4 years ago about finding a war game to mod anyway.. i''m planning to make a chess game for my final project next semester, basicly it''s a chess game and mid way you can change the rules, so that (for example) a knight now will move 2 square forward instead of 2 foward and 1 sideways(or 1 foward 2 sideways), the point is the ai will be smart enough to adapt with the new rules and the ai can also change the rules to his advantage,(may limit to,say, 2 rule change per person per game), the thing is i don''t know what i''m going to use to make this, right now i''m thinking c++ with prolog to do the ai and opengl+sdl to do the graphics, what about aother alternatives? how about c#? is it hard to trasition from c++ for ai i''m thinking clips, or lisp i never actually used any of them so i don''t know if they are any more suitable for my project than prolog is for graphics how about lua, or allegro or maybe i should ditch open gl all together and use i don''t know direct x? again i never use anything other than open gl so i don''t know how more suitable is one to another nothing is coded yet, there''s no design doc yet , so now''s the time to choose what laguage i ''m going to use, but i''m kindda lost

if you are a AI student I strongly recommend not to work on graphics and gui for chess just concentrate on AI.

http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard.html
XBoard and WinBoard are graphical user interfaces for chess. They display a chessboard on the screen, accept moves made with the mouse, and load and save games in Portable Game Notation (PGN). They serve as front-ends for many different chess services, including:
Chess engines that will run on your machine and play a game against you or help you analyze, such as GNU Chess, Crafty, or many others. A list of compatible engines is available.

http://www.playwitharena.com/
Arena is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for chess programs (engines) by Martin Blume. Arena runs on Win 95, NT4 or higher OS versions. Arena is compatible to WinBoard protocol I, II & UCI protocol grafic (800 x 600).

and forget C# if you still havent learn it.

our course course is called "IT" but basicly it ranges from anything to everything else, which includes some computer engineering stuff(computer interfacing, asembly,PLC programming) to internet stuff(server side programming,databases) and also theory stuff(computer organization,GUI design,network protocol)

basicly my idea is to to both graphics and AI so that i can cover more ground and not do any thing too advance in eithe AI or gui, basicly i want to touch a lilttle on everything i''ve learnt,

i never used any of the other laguage beside the one i mentioned(prolog,c++ with opengl, and very little sdl that i learnt on my own tiem) so i was just wandering weather or not the laguage i chose was the right tool for the job,since i never used any other, i don''t want to use some if something else is better for the job but i don''t know about it.

i might even throw in some network code in there if i have extra time(which i doubt i will)

I don''t know about Lisp vs Prolog, but I guess the latter is as good as any. If you know C++ I would recommend that you stick with it instead of switching to C#. What you are trying to do (the project) would be challenge enough without having to learn a new language (even if it isn''t totally different from C++).

As for Lua, Allegro, OpenGL and SDL, well the latter two should work well enough considering you know both anyway. In fact, Allegro is more of a 2D library than 3D so you are better of with SDL, which supports BOTH DirectX and OpenGL.

The bottomline is that you better stick to what you know best. C++, OpenGL, SDL and Prolog sounds good enough to me. Good luck!

"There is no dark side of the moon." - Pink Floyd