Hammer of Code

Well it is my first day back at work without family meddling around the house. It is a lot easier to get, well, anything done. I spent some time today playing around with clients and finalizing my plans for the screencasts. I’m very glad to have wormhole support as I now no longer need to explain why it is so darn difficult to play Risk :P. Since adding wormhole’s to the Risk ruleset it is now impossible to play Risk without a fully up-to-date client (including libtpclient-py and libtpproto-py). I’ve had some difficulty getting a client up and running again in OS X but things have been a breeze on linux. Hopefully the version number of tpclient-pywx can be incremented to force upon everyone Risk compatibility. Other than that I have little today to talk about. My foray into screencasting should begin tomorrow; I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about that!

Rings the bells and spread the word, vacationing family has finally vacated! I am now free from the influence of 4 adults and 5 dogs intruding on my workplace. I have to say I really expected things to go a little better than they did; Originally half of the family was staying at a local campground, but when their time ran up and they were going to leave they found out their trailer was massively out of alignment. They needed to stay an extra 1/2 week for their alignment appointment, and as a result instead of only having 2 people/dogs at the house we had double. I don’t hate my family or anything, its just too many people and dogs in one place.

As for work things have been delayed but not so much I am behind schedule. It was very exciting to learn that many of the AI ‘fellows’ would be working on a Risk AI; It has forced me to think more deeply about how Risk works from an outsiders perspective (and probably going to improve the quality of my screencasts.) I should be recording my screencast’s video this week, and dubbing this week or next. I also received some positive feedback from my mentor Tyler about my map import code; Surprisingly (since I still undervalue myself as a coder) I was not far from the mark. If I put in a concentrated effort it should only be 1-2 days to really clean up that code. I also received some feedback about comments in my code from Mithro: I’m not terribly far from the correct path, but I will be “doxygenating” my functions most likely in the “wrap-up” week that is the last week of GSoC.

Another exciting development from Mithro was the creation of a “Wormholes” patch. The patch updates my Risk code to properly draw lines between planets. This development has to be one of the biggest things to happen to Risk this summer. Map imports was big, and cool, but “Line drawing” is a huge usability feature that Risk was sorely missing. A big thanks to Mithro and anyone else who aided him (and by proxy, me) in getting Risk to display properly.

Well I’ve finally gotten a substantial break away from family to get some productive work done this week. As I was saying earlier, I’ve gotten the default map for the Risk ruleset all sorted out, and I am now working on scripts for the three screencasts I’ve decided to do (Map making, Basic play, and advanced play.) The massive amount of company I have in my home at the moment makes work and blogging pretty difficult, but I’ll survive. For now I will have to leave you with a preview of the default map:

Well I’m getting the feeling I will be having less and less to write about daily in the coming few weeks as things start to wind down. Right now I’m working on scripts for screencasts and I just finished the full default map in SVG. I’ll be sure to post links to videos as I get drafts prepared.

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.