Overview

Sanmill is a free, powerful UCI-like N men’s morris program with CUI, Flutter GUI and Qt GUI.

Nine men’s morris is a strategy board game for two players dating at least to the Roman Empire. The game is also known as nine-man morris, mill, mills, the mill game, merels, merrills, merelles, marelles, morelles, and ninepenny marl in English.

Files

This distribution of Sanmill consists of the following files:

• Readme.md, the file you are currently reading.

• Copying.txt, a text file containing the GNU General Public License version 3.

• src, a subdirectory containing the full source code, including a Makefile that can be used to compile Sanmill CUI on Unix-like systems.

• src/ui/flutter_app, a subdirectory containing a Flutter frontend.

• src/ui/qt, a subdirectory containing a Qt frontend.

How to Build

CUI

Sanmill CUI has support for 32 or 64-bit CPUs, certain hardware instructions, big-endian machines such as Power PC, and other platforms.

It should be easy to compile Sanmill directly from the source code on Unix-like systems with the included Makefile in the folder src. Generally, it is recommended to run make help to see a list of make targets with corresponding descriptions.

cd src
make help
make build ARCH=x86-64-modern

When reporting an issue or a bug, please tell us which version and compiler you used to create your executable. This information can be found by typing the following commands in a console:

./sanmill compiler

Qt Application

If you have started using Ubuntu or any Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, you must install Qt by running the following command as root:

sudo apt-get install qt5-default qtmultimedia5-dev qtcreator

Use Qt Creator to open src/ui/qt/CMakeLists.txt , or run

cd src/ui/qt
cmake .
cmake --build . --target mill-pro

and use Visual Studio to open src\ui\qt\mill-pro.sln to build Qt Application.

Flutter App

Run ./flutter-init.sh , and then use Android Studio or Visual Studio Code to open src/ui/flutter_app to build Flutter App.

We use compile-time environment configs to enable specific parts of the code:

• test to prepare the app for Monkey and Appium testing. (References to external sites are going to be disabled.)
• dev_mode to show the developer mode without needing to enable it first.
• catcher to control the use of Catcher. (This is on by default and needs to be disabled when required.)

All environment configs can be combined and take a value of bool like:

flutter run --dart-define catcher=false dev_mode=true

For ease of use, some launch configs for Android Studio or Visual Studio Code are available. Just select the needed one in the Run and Debug or Run/Debug Configurations tab.

Understanding the code base and participating in the project

Sanmill’s improvement over the last couple of years has been a great community effort. There are a few ways to help contribute to its growth.

Improving the code

If you want to help improve the code, there are several valuable resources:

• In this wiki, many techniques used in Sanmill are explained with a lot of background information.

• The latest source can always be found on GitHub.

• Discussions about Sanmill take place in the Discussions.

Terms of use

Sanmill is free and distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3). Essentially, this means you are free to do almost exactly what you want with the program, including distributing it among your friends, making it available for download from your website, selling it (either by itself or as part of some bigger software package), or using it as the starting point for a software project of your own.

The only real limitation is that whenever you distribute Sanmill in some way, you must always include the full source code or a pointer to where the source code can be found. If you make any changes to the source code, these changes must also be made available under the GPL.

For full details, read the copy of the GPL v3 found in the file named Copying.txt.

As additional permission under section 7, you are allowed to distribute the software through an app store, even if that store has restrictive terms and conditions that are incompatible with the GPL, provided that the source is also available under the GPL with or without this permission through a channel without those restrictive terms and conditions.

All unofficial builds and forks of the app must be clearly labeled as unofficial in the app’s name (e.g. “Sanmill UNOFFICIAL”, never just “Sanmill”) or use a different name altogether. If any code changes are made, the fork should use a completely different name and app icon. All unofficial builds and forks MUST use a different application ID, in order to not conflict with a potential official release.