Activities

Posted on May 23, 2008 by tehdiplomat

Well, some activities going on over here. While April and May have been good blogging months (note the 2 posts in the month, instead of the normal monthly apologetic “sorry haven’t really posted, nor worked on the game”) and I’ve actually been productive in the last week or so on the game. While I haven’t worked on any of the features that I plan on being in the 1.0 version of late, I have gotten back into looking at all the code, and refactoring a bit for different reasons.

One of my biggest problems when trying to get back into this project as it ages, is remembering what I was doing, do to my lacking documentation. It might be a bit too late for this project, but for the next one it’s definitely something that will be an early priority. The stuff that was refactored wasn’t just for clarity for my sake, it also enabled me to decouple the game code from the UI code, allowing me to more easily port the game to another maps program or something neat and new like XNA.

Hopefully I’ll be able to code for an hour each day and hammer out all of the base gameplay stuff, and then I can worry about multicomputer work.

I’m moving to a new abode during June, so I’ll probably have a productivity drop as weekends turn into, cleaning, packing, moving instead of lazing, gaming, and possibly coding. Hopefully all that goes well.

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Firefox 3

Posted on May 16, 2008 by tehdiplomat

Yes the RC1 was released last night/today or whenever. If you are currently on FF2, I’d recommend upgrading immeadiately. The only caveats are the normal, extensions may not work. And if you really need them you can try Nighty Tester Tools, which attempts to force through your extensions.

It has a lot of impressive improvements which I appreciate highly. It also seemed to fix a problem I was having with Gskirm where it wasn’t working FF 3 Beta 5. I couldn’t tell what the problem was, but I have a feeling it had to do with how it was loading scripts. One of my current goals for the game is to remove the dependency on a single API (in this case Google Maps) thus making it easier to port. Probably the first thing I’ll try porting it to (once I get enough of it done where I feel it would be cool to port) is XNA. When I first heard about XNA I thought it was a great idea, and I’m in a great situation to be able to try it out and see what it has to offer for board games -> video games.

Well, I’ve definitely learned things that are necessary for personal projects. Documentation, specs, and avoiding feature creep. Also to factor in dead times. I don’t know if I like the idea of having a schedule. But maybe for features that I’m currently working on, I can set a date. And just repeat that cycle every time I’m working on something. We’ll see how that works. I’ve been trying to setup some talks with one of my friends about a Game idea he had. I think that one will be fleshed out way more before it comes to the internets.

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Game ideas

Posted on April 24, 2008 by tehdiplomat

So I can’t remember if I ever mentioned this, but I thought of a few things recently that I want to “add” to the game. The first of these is an alternate battle system. This system would allow for the game to blend into a “true” board game by using real dice, that you can buy in any gaming store. It may use some funky sides like d4, and d12, but so be it. More feasible than finding those d3s and d7s.

The other, if I were a true software team with a project manager and fancy specs, and fancy MS project files everywhere, they would push off for a time in between cycles. So we’ll see when I decide to do it for, butttt I’m planning for a second refactor (the first was to the improved JS prototypes), but this one would be to separate out all of the game logic and fun stuff, from the UI/Google Maps API stuff. If I could do this smoothly, I’d be able to port the game to a different form (like say maybe XNA) with more ease cause the parts would already be noticeably different. I have to check how much work that entails, but it might be something I can do that doesn’t require tons of brain cycles.

Wellll.. that’s all I have for my bimonthly post.. good enough from my point of view.

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