Hammer of Code

Well today was another one of those odd “productive days.” I got naming constellations working, as well as their bonuses. At present to label a constellation all one needs to do is create a text object with %NAME%|%BONUS% that has the same color as the constellation being labelled. This may or not be the best way to get things done, but for the time being it works. I’ve now gotten a little bit ahead of my supervision and am planning to spend a bit of time dubbing JLP’s screencast to give my supervision time to comment (as I’m sure there will be positive and negative opinions of my work [even I have some :O]).

For anyone interested in my cats: its been a day off of subcutaneous IV and both cats appear to be acting normally (no signs of kidney failure). There’s been cat pee in the litter-box, we’ve seen both cats eat, and behaviour is normal; All good signs for healthy kidneys. Another day or two of normal behaviour and we should be clear.

I dare say it, but these last two days may have been the most productive days I’ve had all summer. Now, its not that I worked an excessive amount, its just that things WORKED out… Now this efficiency is compounded by the fact that yesterday I spent almost the entire day dealing with my cats (one, the other, or both, we don’t know) possibly eating some Lily petals; We found out shortly after that this causes renal failure, and after a benign bloodtest and subcutaneous IV (phew :D) we’ll be monitoring the cats for a few days to ensure they are OK.

Back to coding: Long story short, I’d just barely started implementing XML imports, for real (the library was successfully being built, loaded, etc.) and I’m pretty much done now. It took less than a full day to get it implemented, and I have to say, TinyXML is REALLY easy to use. I’m left now with figuring out some simple (and straight-forward) way to grab constellation names from SVGs (and even store them to one in the first place :P) At present my thinking is to get the name of the constellation from a text box with text the same color as the constellation color.

I guess I should also say HOW exactly my import is working at the moment. Not counting the lack of constellation names this is what I have so far:

• Users create rectangles in Inkscape to represent planets/systems. The color of the rectangle indicates the constellation that system belongs to. To name the planet/system users edit the properties of the object by changing its “id” to the name, and the “label” to the same.
• Once the user is satisfied with the orientation and number of planets they proceed to create “diagram connectors” to indicate connectivity between planets. Make sure to snap the connectors to the center of the rectangles, you should be able to drag the rectangle and have the connectors adjust on their own.

At this point in time I guess I’ll continue to refine and bugproof the import code, but its very exciting to have a working model so quickly.

Glad to be back into the swing of things and actively coding again. This week marked the end of the first half of GSoC and the beginning of the last! All in all, it was a week full of “in-betweens;” I spent a good portion of the week working on my official GSoC midterm report, as well as my Thousand Parsec midterm report and the other portion on beginning to integrate TinyXML (for map imports) into the ruleset and planning screencasts. At present it is my intention to implement map imports, create informative screencasts and improve the quality of my ruleset overall, before the end of the term. Those plans will be finalized this weekend after I speak with my mentor more formally.

As for myself, I’m doing quite good, very anxious to start new work. As I said things are mainly “in-between” and I’m waiting on things here and there to get the ball fully rolling. At present I am waiting to here back from JLP on screencasts (as he is producing some as well) and the community-at-large on properly creating a module for including TinyXML++.

This weeks recap won’t be day to day, as it was more of a blur; Here is what I got done:

• Started developing ideas for screencasts to better inform new players on playing Risk
• Fixed up some of the more annoying bugs, particularly the “phantom-ownership” and “view” bugs. See branch-log.
• Wrote my GSoC Midterm evaluation
• Wrote my TP Midterm report
• Created (and, eventually merged,) a WIP branch to add TinyXML support to without breaking the ruleset. At present the changes are now merged and I am waiting to find out the proper way to use/create a “ticpp” module. commit.
• Spent time accustoming myself to how TinyXML is used.
• Decided on using SVG to represent maps visually. Most likely planets will correspond to circles, adjacencies to lines, and constellations to color (thanks mithro!)
• Emails, emails, emails, and some more emails. I think I could get by if it was my job just to write emails to people all day

Well it turns out the last day or so has not been as eventful as planned. An extended meeting at the bank (in a good way ;), don’t worry) and other errands kept my wife and I busy for a few hours. Meaning, namely, that the only work I got to do in the past two days occured yesterday. Since I didn’t blog then, at least I have something to talk about.

Yesterday was spent mainly on creating my midterm report, with a bit of “XML-work” tossed in there. I can’t spoil anything on the midterm report, as it will be public soon. I will say though, working on my “trendy” Apple Macintosh Computron certainly produced an excellent formatted and beautiful report. Unfortunately I will have to spend some time retooling the report to be just as beautiful in OpenOffice to get an ODF file (but maybe ezod can “spec”ify my document either way!? who knows.)

As for XML fun, I’ve created a work-in-progress (WIP) branch so I can unobstructively include the necessary TinyXML++ source files into my module directory. As well I’ve created a helper file that will house the actual map import functionality, cutting quite a bit of code OUT of the Risk class file (giving it a needed clean up.) I will try and encapsulate a lot of the worker map functions (like createStarSystem, etc) into the same map import file. I’ll be creating a server option to enable or disable XML map imports tomorrow so I can merge my WIP branch in and not make the ruleset unplayable; Until map imports work I can have the default config’s not use map files, and once XML imports work, then I can eliminate the option!

Thats all for now! Oh, by the way, if anyone reading this does any small time stock trading please let me know, I wouldn’t mind some advice

Below is my entrance in the gbatemp.net Acekard 2 review competition. All GSoC’ers need not worry about reading it, unless they really would like to!

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Short post today… After a bit of a correspondance with Mithro and Tyler I’ve decided that I will be parsing my XML with TinyXML and focusing on meeting my rulesets needs over the needs of other rulesets. I was pleased (and sort of surprised I hadn’t learned already) that I could still validate my XML with other tools, concurrent to parsing it with TinyXML++. At Mithro’s suggestion I will also be looking into SVG, particularly on creating an object to accurately represent a star system, and its connections. Dealing with SVG might be a pipe-dream, however, and I will be content in simply having XML map imports in the first place. We’ll see what I can find out and about on the web, any pointers for good places to learn about extending SVG with new objects would be appreciated.

I also spent a good chunk of my day planning for the creation of a short series of screencasts on Thousand Parsec and the Risk ruleset. I plan to spend a bit of time on these screencasts, especially on the ones that apply to Thousand Parsec as a whole, and as such am awaiting approval form administrators. More on those screencasts once things get to be more final.

Finally, I got around to squashing my “phantom ownership” bug and believe I also squashed my view problems bug. I’ll have to play some more games with other people to see if I can find any other good bugs to squish.

Well the gloves are off as I start back into “real work” this second term. While I am glad that I paced myself by giving myself time to test and reflect, I really have missed the active work and planning of things on the go. I again have more that I want to do in a week than I will probably have time for. This week marks the beginning and end of mid-term evaluations, and as such I completed my official Google evaluation, and will be producing a 500 word (2 pageish) report for Mithro and my mentoring organization on my project thus far (to be worded in layman’s terms.) This report should be helpful in producing better documentation for beginning players as it forces me to think about my project from a beginners perspective. More on screencasting and XML after the jump…

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Seeing that midterms evaluations lay so near things have started to get exciting again! This week saw the transition from private alpha testing to actual player testing, a good deal of C++ reading, and the start of planning for the second half of the term. I have to say my spirits were starting to wane, alpha testing was getting very dull and dreary. I wasn’t quite sure if I was testing wrong, if the stage of testing was nearing an end, or if I was just running out of ideas.

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Contrary to what I expected I ended up spending the day looking into XML, xml-parsers and map importing. I kicked things off by familiarizing myself with XML; turns out I had a decent grasp on how XML worked already. I did, however, learn that it was possible to define a “Document Type Definition” or DTD to specify which tags have what, which attributes exist of tags, and the like. I threw together a simple DTD for the map metalanguage; It allows the map to have multiple constellations, each with a name attribute. Those constellations can then have multiple planets. Each planet has a name, id, x, y attribute, as well as any number of “id”s of adjacent planets.

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You may have been wondering where I disappeared to the last two days. The combination of a slow Monday and family visiting on Tuesday made for little to write about, and consequently I forgot to write, about anything! Rest assured I have been working. The start of my week has been occupied largely by reading, and I can gladly announce that I finished reading (for the first time :P) Effective C++ by Scott Meyers.

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