The Clients

It is possible to play a game of Sea Wars IV without any more software. The message format used for communications is human-readable text, so it would be possible to telnet directly to port 5555 and play a game that way. That is rather Spartan, so we provided some other options.

Slightly more sophisticated is the HumanConsolePlayer class, which provides a text based display of the current board and a simple command prompt. It is still not up to today's gaming standards, but is much easier to use than telnet.

We also developed two rudimentary graphical interfaces: one using Apple's Cocoa frameworks on Mac OS X (visually attractive); another using Java's Swing library (portable). They are a lot nicer than the text display, but there is still room for improvement.

Of course, we also took the time to develop a client program which plays a game without human intervention.