New Year is just around the corner, but what kind of New Year - without New Year's contests with gifts? We in the KolibriOS project decided not to depart from the tradition, and to hold our own competition, with cash prizes.

Since we are on Habré, a simple random prize drawing like a contest from Mail.Ru we consider inappropriate here, and the prizes will need to be earned. Since KolibriOS is a hobby project, the competition will be connected with entertainment. Well, and since we are not as rich as Mail.Ru , the prizes will be smaller :-)

The challenge for the competition is to write your own Hummingbird game . This should be done before the New Year 2015, Moscow time, i.e. until December 31, 2014 24:00 MSK
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Anyone can take part in the competition, regardless of age and place of residence. You can participate both alone and as a team (with the participation of the team, in case of a win, one prize will be awarded to the whole team).

For the game, you can use any programming language - at least FASM (preferably), at least JAVA, at least Brainfuck . However, if the compiler of your chosen language is currently not available for Hummingbird, you will first have to teach this compiler to build programs for Hummingbirds. Therefore, we recommend choosing a language for which there is already a compiler ( for Brainfuck, by the way, there is ).

The source code of the game (including all “resources” - pictures, sprites, sounds, music, if any) should be uploaded to the SVN project under one of the approved open-source licenses . The game should be compiled from source using the Tup auto-build system on the KolibriOS server. To make it easier to add a game to an auto-build (and also taking into account the previous paragraph), it’s best to write a game in a language for which there is already an example of auto-build (FASM, NASM, C--, GCC, MSVC). But we are not looking for easy ways, right?

Games of all participants who successfully completed the task will be put up for voting at Habré in January 2015. According to the voting results, prizes will be awarded:

• 1st place - $ 1,000 United States
• 2nd place - $ 500 USA
• 3rd place - $ 250 US

Important: in our previous competition on Habré , only 4 out of 11 participants fully met all the conditions . At that time, we did not strictly follow the rules, and put all 11 applications to the vote. But now there are more prizes, the task is an order of magnitude more difficult, and we are warning in advance, therefore, if someone does not fulfill the conditions this time, then their game will not be allowed to vote.

PS By the way, we still cannot contact the winners of our last contest - x128 and GoLiaF - so if one of the two of you is reading these lines now, please contact us for your prizes.

FAQ / FAQ:

• You can write a game that is already in the Hummingbird . It is possible, but not interesting.
• You can port an existing game that you wrote earlier (assuming all other rules are followed), but you cannot port a game written by someone else. That is, if PapaBubaDiop wants to port its “Field of Miracles ”, then it is possible. And if his “Field of Miracles” wants to port someone else, then it is impossible.
• You can publish an unfinished game on our forum for beta testing by its project participants. Sources at the same time show optional. But to participate in the competition, the source code should appear in the auto-assembly before the New Year.
• You can ask on our forum and on Habré questions that arise when writing a game, but to answer some of them, we will ask you to show the code.
• It is possible (and even necessary) to point out to us the bugs in the kernel and the Hummingbird drivers that prevent you from writing the game, but we do not promise to fix them before the New Year.
• The game should not only be compiled by auto-build, but also work in Kolibri (thanks, cap!). The Hummingbird auto-build version in which the game is running should be released between today and the New Year. In other words, do not make the game under Kolibri 0.6.5.0 , released on 02/14/2007.
• Existing participants of the KolibriOS project have the right to participate in the competition on general terms, but they do not have the right to submit to the competition the games that they have already written for the Hummingbird before publishing this competition.
• “Where does the golds?” - “Out of the forest, of course. Father, you hear, robbing, and I take it away. ” This is money we received from Google for mentoring four students in Google Summer Code 2014 . I will write an article about this soon too.
• NEW: “Resources” for the game (pictures, sprites, sounds, music, if any) can be used by others, provided that they are also distributed under one of the approved open-source licenses .
• NEW: Each participant can send up to three (3) games written by him (new or ported) to the competition, and accordingly receive up to three (3) prizes.

Answers will be supplemented upon receipt of questions.