Grid Rover
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THE STORY SO FAR

The Earth Space Exploration Organization (ESEO) announced that it has reached Proxima Centauri. The space ship carries rovers which will be used to explore the surface of Proxima's lone planet.  The objective is to discover new minerals and return them to the lander for study..

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One of the problems a young software engineer must face is the apparent lack if readily available, simple, and entertaining opportunities to code.  While some are able to use creativity and perseverance to overcome this, others are not and require someone else to provide an entertaining problem to solve while honing their programming skills.

GridRover will provide one such entertaining problem. Several, in fact. GridRover will be a game in which a player (which may be a human or a program) must guide a rover from its lander on the surface of a distant planet along rugged terrain in search of scientific samples and valuable artifacts to return to the lander for study.

The rover's search area will be represented as a grid (hence the name of the project) of squares, each with an altitude and contents. Maps will be generated randomly in early development, but as the program matures we plan to implement a file format for maps and a method to load them. Hazards such as impassable terrain, steep inclines, and perhaps alien beings or other rovers will challenge the player to keep their rover functioning. The game will end when the rover is destroyed or runs out of batteries.

Points will be assigned for the various objects returned to the lander -- a different value for each type of object. Objects can be roughly identified in the field using the rover's built-in emitters and sensors. Each object type will have a unique or almost-unique "spectrum" of emitters to which it reacts.

Ideally, a human would play GridRover themselves a few times to learn the mechanics of the game. Then, they would use the programming language of their choice to create a program to guide the rover. They can then improve their program to get better and better scores. Challenges they face would include identifying objects accurately, not falling over cliffs, not getting stuck in pits the rover can't climb out of, making it back to the lander to recharge the rover's batteries (a maximum of, say, 3 times), and dealing with unexpected situations.

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Grid Rover is being developed under the GNU Public License.
To get a copy of this license you can find it online at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html or download the text file GNUPublicLicense.txt from the source tree.
Unless otherwise noted, all files in this repository are released under the GNU Public License.