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Hi Mike,
Yes the program was coded from scratch. I've had the development environment kicking around under my desk at home for the last three years. It wasn't until one of the students said "wouldn't this be a nice idea..." about three/four weeks ago that I finally cracked open the box and put it to use.
The app was initially coded in C, but after the first week, the code had grown enough for me to see that I'd have maintainability problems in less than a week and then recoded everything in C++ which it still is now.
It's just a shame I wasn't really able to get a viable prc out until the week of our regional (UTC), but frankly I thought I wouldn't have something ready until Florida.
In terms of the coding effort, the game rules are simple enough except for how to score the (muttering) tethers. (I kept asking myself is a "tetherBot a field object or does a field object have a tetherBot?) What really became painful to think about was maintaining an object hierarchy and dealing with bitmap window refreshing. This is kinda the problem with C++ and C. I had a C version out in just a few days of starting, yet it took me about a week in setting up the C++ version knowing what I had already done and proven out in C!
As you can tell, I've spent probably a little too much time staring at the screen. I'll upload the source files for interested parties to take a look at (later). I'm not going to say exactly *when* as I feel obligated to add a whole bunch more comments than I have in there now. As a software engineer by training I did follow the rules for variable naming, whitespace, and the like, but there are never enough comments!
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