>>me.become!(:ruby_developer)
{ Monthly Archives }
Well the time has come to publish my first weekly report. I wasn’t terribly sure on the level of detail and length that is expected but I still don’t officially have to publish this report anyways, so this will be a practice run. I think its sensible to not subject people spotting this article on Planet SOC not to see every last detail, so anyone interested, read on!
Today I spent most of the day reading “the book I got.” I don’t really think I should talk too much about what I am reading. I will say there is a lot of good in the book for almost everyone in GSoC to pick up on. I’d like to get as much of it read before things really get rolling on the 26th.
I also spent a little bit of time trying to get some sort of backup virtual machine running on my Mac. Its pretty messy pushing all my little changes up to the server so I can compile them on my other system. I’d really rather get tpserver-cpp compiling properly on OSX than compiling on a linux VM, but if I can’t get things going I’ll need somewhere to compile my work.
As well tomorrow I’ll be posting my first weekly digest. The post will most likely be a recap of the big things that go accomplished during the week. Sorry for the short post, once everyone gets their book I will be able to say more 
Today was a rather eventful day, and I have a lot to talk about. Among the things I did today I almost got tpserver-cpp compiling on my mac, created and almost launched a shell ruleset, almost completely overhauled my wiki entry, and received my acceptance gift from Google. Out of all of the things I did though I would have to say almost getting a shell ruleset working was the most exciting. I’ll talk about all of this and more after the jump (actually probably not any more than what I already said what I would talk about)
Mithro and I had a really good chat on IRC about turn order. The conversations is availible on Thousand Parsec’s IRC log starting here.
What I know so far:
I will be doing some scenarios on paper, and hashing out more of the nitty gritty of the turn ordering this week. Next week I will switch gears into some coding and getting myself a shell ruleset running. More after the jump on what it is to be a coder, ruleset variations, and how awesome TextMate is.
Well I went at it for another few hours yesterday attempting to get a compile going. I’ve yet to bring my issues up to any of the folks on IRC, but I will still talk about what is going on here. As I said yesterday I trudged through my problems with compiling/configuring libtprl. As for compiling tpserver-cpp I have run into many more issues. More on those after the jump.
Well I’m starting to wind down from the “have to touch everything I see” phase of playing with my new macbook and have actually moved on to compiling libtprl and tpserver-cpp to run natively in OSX (and not a VM.) I encountered what I would call Bug #0: Nothing works until you try it again the next day. I was having a lot of difficulty getting just libtprl to compile and kept coming back with an error about readline. I eventually got fed up and upon trying again today I stumbled past that hurdle. The only difference was in following mithro’s mac instructions here to the T. Most likely the Mac version of the packages I was hung up on were causing the problem, and specifying to use the Fink versions cleared things up.
Can’t say my focus the last day and a half hasn’t been on anything but GSoC. What with celebrating my dad’s 50th birthday yesterday and getting to play with my new mabook today. You should all be glad to know both went/are going very well!
We gave my dad Rockband for his birthday with the 6 song Boston pack and it was quite a success. We’ve had Rockband hidden throughout the house for over a month, taking it out here and there to practice, and despite our best efforts he HAD found out what he was going to get (but not the boston part :P.) Turns out he was looking for my keys after I lost them and happened to check under my bed, as well as my sisters bed (both of which contained Rockbandy goodness.) At least we didn’t give it away! I think there were a few times were we almost slipped up.
As for my macbook, I have to say I am in bliss. I know a lot of the TP developers are die-hard Linux users but I have to say I just love Mac Os X. Its not that I can’t/don’t do Linux; It’s just that its such a well put together package of applications/interface/design/etc. I find a lot of the star applications in OSX have so much charm and artistic flare to them in terms of design and usability. Wrap all the up with Quicksilver and a Terminal and I’d take OSX over Linux any day. Sorry guys I’m approaching a fully installed system here and look forward to the next work week to start picking apart some rulesets on Monday.
Apparently Planet-SoC thinks I am double posting in some capacity. I checked the feed there, as I am having no problems here, and the only thing I saw was that the address pointed to my old RSS and not my feedburner RSS. I changed that and hopefully my blog won’t be spamming the crap out of peoples feed readers. (It could also have been that my blog REALLY wanted you to read it, so it misbehaved…)
Apparently Planet-SoC thinks I am double posting in some capacity. I checked the feed there, as I am having no problems here, and the only thing I saw was that the address pointed to my old RSS and not my feedburner RSS. I changed that and hopefully my blog won’t be spamming the crap out of peoples feed readers. (It could also have been that my blog REALLY wanted you to read it, so it misbehaved…)
Mithro mentioned in some really great comments some ways to improve my ideas, particularly on how to make territory acquisition quicker and more conducive to a 4X-experience. He also mentioned he would really like to see some form of wormhole or pathway connecting star systems. I’ve yet to speak with him on irc , but what I write in this post is subject to change after I get a chance to speak with him.
I want to first speak about movement and territory connectivity. Knowing that the community leaders would like to see graph-based travel and will support me in seeing it to fruition really puts me at ease. With their support I would be more than willing to complete that feature. I do not yet fully comprehend the ins and outs of rulesets but I do forsee this as an area I will need a lot of assistance from the mentors on to complete. As mithro said in his comments, “[t]his would require some client modification,” and from what I was told before being accepted, client modifications are a little more difficult. As a corollary of what I said in my “compromises” post; even if the pathways mechanic is so incredibly difficult it cannot be done, I can always fall back on a free movement mechanic. Both movement mechanics will work, yet I do agree with mithro that the pathways mechanic is more interesting.
Note: I took a little break here and chatted with my mentor, any flow I had going while writing is completely gone!
As for the turn ordering and territory claiming ideas mithro proposed: I’m sort of shocked to say I hadn’t really thought of it like he puts it, yet the solution seems very elegant. As he puts it, players start the game with some number of reinforcements, say 100, and on their first turn issues build orders in any territories he wishes to claim (with some lower limit for units to restrict 1 unit on every territory bids, might also be worked out with some clever math on figuring out # of units to give.)
Once players bid play continues as normal, in fact, things were never “not normal” because the initial turn is simply a normal turn wherein no one owns any territory. Any conflicts in bidding result in the loser being returned their units; if players tie, a roll is done to figure a winner. As I was saying, the normal play continues and now since the players have units they can issue any move orders they want (these will of course be to the next adjacent system, to either attack, or “free-move”.) My only concern, and Mithro may feel otherwise, is that if the balance isn’t just right way too much will happen from turn to turn; thing is, I won’t know anything about the balance until it is play tested.
This solution seems more and more elegant to me as I think about it: It completely removes any worry about the state of the game, it removes trying to control movement to one order, and it speeds up the play of the game. It also fits in well with many other ideas of how the game should work. With that said the focus of my preparations will most likely shift to trying to figure out graph-based movement restriction. Wish me luck, and please comment if you see in glaring errors in my plans.
On the side: just wanted to also mention that I spent a while yesterday drawing out the graph of the territories on the Risk board. Strangely enough I see quite a few constellations in the board I’ve drawn, such as Orion, the Southern Cross and Cassiopeia; This will make naming very easy, and also a bit of fun having the continents of Risk translated to constellations.
