Game Player - Step 1 - Capturing the Board

Right, Step 1 in our Game Player program is capturing the game board.

This is actually an incredibly easy step so before we do that let's do a little setting up of our system's architecture. Yuk, I hate phrases like that, over complicated computing science terms are a pain in the butt and will not feature in this blog where avoidable. I'd much rather say let's get all the bits of our system in place...

As mentioned we are going to use OpenCV for all our reasoning purposes so we need a way of accessing OpenCV from Java. In order to do this we make a native library that we can call from within our Java code using the Java Native Interface (JNI). What is a native library you ask? It is code written in another language, often C, that can be called from other programs. All those .dll files in your Windows system or all those .so files in your Linux distribution are examples of native libraries and are what we are about to make. Don't worry, it's not as scary as it sounds!