SFOURMI - SF TEAM 1998-2023

1. ABOUT

SuperFourmi is an artificial life-style simulation of ants. It was originally developed by highschool students starting in 1998 and posted on a website. The current version was slightly adapted from the original 2D, SDL1 version from 2002, and can be compiled with CMake on Linux using SDL2.
It is available on Github

2. AUTHORS

The SFourmi Program has be written by two students Michel Tran Ngoc (T&T) and Manik Bhattacharjee (aka Kinam) with the help of FL and TATMF (graphics).

3. LICENCE

Copyright (C) 1998-2023  Michel Tran Ngoc, Manik Bhattacharjee, 
Tristan Millner, François Leiber

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>

4. COMPILING

Download the source code from the website (either using git clone or the zip file). You need to have SDL2, SDL2_image and SDL2_ttf installed in your system (e.g. libsdl2-dev, libsdl2-image-dev, libsdl2-ttf-dev packages in Ubuntu). In a terminal, go to the directory of the project, then:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
cd src
./SFourmi # to run it

Some work is in progress to compile SFourmi with emscripten so that it will be compiled to web assembly and run directly in the browser. To try it you need to python3 and an installation of emscripten:

source "MYEMSCRIPTENINSTALL/emsdk/emsdk_env.sh"
mkdir buildweb
cd buildweb
emcmake cmake ..
emmake make
cd src
python -m http.server

You can then open the page http://0.0.0.0:8000/ in your browser. But it does NOT work yet.

5. INSTALL

• Requirements:

• 586-133Mhz with 2Mb of free disk and some RAM (128Mb minimum recommanded)

One of these operating systems is needed: 1 Linux or xBSD with SDL2. (www.libsdl.org) 2 Microsoft Windows(tm) 95 or higher with DirectX installed( >5) (probably not working anymore, untested)

LINUX : Binary packages are not provided anymore, follow compilation instructions. Then copy /usr/doc/sfourmi-{version}/sfourmi.ini in your $HOME directory. This file is NEEDED to configure the program, if not found it will run with default values.

WINDOWS : Not sure about the current state.

6. What is/is not SFourmis ?

• SFourmi is NOT a game. It could be as fun as game but the interactivity is limited. Maybe, it will become a true game in the next century. :-p

• SFourmi IS a simulation of artificial life that tries to simulates a real ant's life by copying the reality. Each ant is self-dependant and can communicate with others.

7. Keys, Actions and Informations.

F2 Go inside the nest. F3 Focus on the nest's main entrance. F4 Enable/Disable the mini-map. F5 Focus on the selected ant. F9 Save the map and its ants. (under Sfourmi.sf in the current directory) F11-F12 Change the colony. V Enable/Disable the violent mode (Ants kill their ennemies) S Show/Hide the statistics T Enable/Disable Turbo mode. F Full Screen

! To load a saved map, just 'SFourmi name_of_map'

Arrow keys move around the map. You can move by clicking on the mini-map, too.

 For further informations, don't hesitate to mail us and visit our site
	sfourmi.log@online.fr or manik-fourmi@altern.org