This library provides useful tools for 24-hour programming competitions like Marathon24, Deadline24 and others.

This library has four dependencies:

• SFML2.x – Networking, visualization, event handling
• SFGUI – User interface
• Gflags – Flags parsing
• Easylogging++ – Logging

You need to install just the first one, other three are in the project and are compiled together with this library (and Easylogging++ is header only).

To install SFML, you can use your system package manager. For example on ubuntu, you can run:

$ sudo apt-get install libsfml-dev

You can install SFGUI and Gflags as well, if you don't want to compile them with every new project. Just follow the instructions of the individual libraries.

Make sure everything is installed properly by compiling the library together with the provided examples. To compile this library you will need cmake (or you can write your own Makefile or edit the one that is in templates/light/).

Go to the project root directory and run:

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make

In the build/bin/ directory you will find compiled examples. Try to run examples_tcp_server and then (while the first binary is still running) examples_tcp_client -- these programs should send each other a message over TCP. You can also try the Candy Eaters example with the visualizer by running:

$ ./candy_eaters_server --ports=5500,5600 --vis
$ ./candy_eaters --port=5500 --vis --toolbar

Notice: In-source build is disabled (i.e. running cmake . in the root directory), so you really need to create the build directory and run cmake .. from there.

When you are participating in 24-hour format contests you can write the code for it on three different occasions.

• First there is code you can share between all these contests -- in this project this code lives under c24/ subdirectory.
• Then there is code that you prepare before the contest itself, which is specific to this contest (implements the exact communication protocol, etc.). Examples of these can be found under templates/ subdirectory.
• Finally there is code that you write on the contest itself. Such an example can be found under examples/candy_eaters/.

Here is a tutorial to get you started:

• Quick start, a.k.a. from the template light to a working example