Hooray! Now I can finally start moving people off good old 0.36, so I can Break Stuff again.

And, I'd like to invite you to wifight! Yes, you! The client is now posted to the front page. See you in the chat!

So for the last two months or so, I've just been pushing on getting the win32 port of the wifight client up and running. The game engine had already been ported, but that still left all the UI. And there is actually a lot of it now. So what I did was write a parser that reads from the PalmOS .rcp file and outputs some C-style tables into a header file. Then I #include that header file back into the C++ and have some code that parses the data in it and recreates the same UI, but with win32-native elements (buttons, edit fields, checkboxes etc.) Then button clicks and such are passed to the portable Screen object for processing which doesn't know or care which OS it is running on. So this is really getting the clients in sync. I'm at the point where you can switch between screens, play turns (of course!) and a lot of the features work, including a bunch of the menu items and buttons.

It's still a work in progress, but you can try the build I just posted to the forums if you have a wifight login already.

So that's coming along nicely, and the client codebase is getting very portableized in general, which should make future ports go much more easily. And now at this point I'm doubling back and porting the PalmOS build to the new portable code. So hopefully by the time everything is working on both sides again I'll have a nice portable codebase to build features on, and hopefully I'll be able to add basic UI features to both clients simultaneously.

Wifight winclient has also been cursorially tested on WINE, so if you're on Mac or Linux (or ...?) and at all adventurous, you should give it a shot.

Also, as mentioned in the wifight discussion forum, I started on a Windows port of the wifight client a few weeks ago. It's coming along pretty well. It might seem counter-intuitive to port mobile software such as wifight to a desktop platform, but I think it will pay off. You certainly can't beat the size of the market. Pretty much everyone these days runs Windows or can get access to Windows. Most modern OSes (Mac, Linux, etc) will even emulate Windows. And I already had to port the game renderer itself to Windows in order to run wifight in the Palm simulator. So that part was already working. The networking and file storage stuff ported over pretty well too. Hooray for jnetlib and sqlite!

Now I'm working on recreating all the UI. Basically I'm trying to set things up where I get to reuse as much of my work on the PalmOS UI as possible. Any changes to the PalmOS UI resource file should just automagically show up in the port, and I shouldn't have to manually recreate anything.

So, I started writing a program to parse Palm resource files and it went pretty well. So far it extracts all the alert resources and writes out a .h for the Windows code to include, which recreates the alert on the fly as needed.

Next up will be parsing out and recreating the form resources (i.e. game list, game screen, about box etc.) Then the menus. Not sure how I'll do those but I'll figure it out when I get there. Then I need to get all these UI components talking to the app code in a portable way. All of this is helping to smooth the way for future ports too.

And of course the next platform coming up will be: iPhone! 99% sure anyway. By popular demand.

I've been doing a lot of reading up on roguelike and dungeony type games. This is gonna be fun.

0.34:

• added even more error checking in the TCP/IP handling code for reported TX connection probs
• fixed a crash bug when you tried to start a game with a player from the player list screen

0.33:

• added a nifty 'User Guide' button that appears in the Select Game screen if there's a User Guide for that game
• fixed no buttons in gamelistscreen bug
• fixed circle scaling math bug that was making the Dots dots look crooked
• made player roster show 8 rows instead of 7
• fixed an entity Z order bug
• moved game list text field in progress pop so it doesn't overlap screenshot icon
• reviewed and improved netlib error handling in cases of error
• tightened up HUD text left and right padding

0.32:

• new player 'Where to?' popup no longer includes 'New game' option, because if you're brand-new, who are you gonna make a game with? Now just 'Spectate' and 'Chat' options.
• fixed bug where gadgets would paint over New Game screen if you came from the player list
• swapped positions of 'Browse Games Archive' and 'Browse Player List' menu items
• fixed cursor disappearing bug in gamescreen, at least in some cases
• fixed another related cursor repaint bug

Pretty cool. I have to give the credit to Reversi, I think. It's actually pretty fun and is turning out to be a great fit to wifight. I'm really glad I added it.

This is just a mockup, not an actual playable game (yet.) A sketch I made in Inkscape, converted from SVG to wifight description, and displayed in the client.

Normally I tend to not show off what I'm working on until it's almost done. I can't help it: I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I just want it to be as awesome as possible when you do see it.

But I thought, why not try developing this one in public, and let the world tell me what it thinks as we go. Maybe it will be fun.

So, Dungeon.

Thats's a stats bar on the right. It seems to be a standard feature for all RPGs so I'm sticking with it. Then maybe your inventory appears in the box below the stats.

On the left you have the dungeon view. You would see the room you're in, and a little bit of the rooms around you (that you have been to.) Your avatar/little dude would appear in the center of the room and the various objects/monsters/etc in that room would also appear surrounding the player. That's what the green blob and squiggly line (I mean, a scary snake!) represent.

Each level will be a 2d grid of rooms. The levels will be procedurally generated, so it will be a different layout each time. That's gonna be fun to code! And fun to play I hope.

A while back I wrote a little MUD-like rooms-n-objects layer (a real simple one, just for fun. Lua is incredibly well suited for it.) so now I'm building on top of that. That's what's generating those green buttons. I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to go from a MUDlike freeform node system to a 2d grid layout yet, but I can't wait to find out.

The gray boxes represent some kind of UI (to be determined) to perform various actions, like, say, search, casting spells, etc.

So that's the sketch so far. What do you think?

Reversi is a game played on an 8x8 board. Four pieces are placed onto the center 4 squares before play begins. Players take turns placing pieces of their color (white or black, black goes first) onto empty spaces on the board. The position must have at least one or more contiguous lines of the opponent's pieces between it and another one of the player's pieces. After placing the piece, the trapped opponent's pieces color changes to the player's color. Hard to explain, but easy to learn, especially because only legal moves are selectable in wifight Reversi.

You can read (and write!) about Reversi on the wifight wiki, and also spectate Reversi games on wifight.

You do not need to update your client to play Reversi on wifight. It will just magically show up in your game select screen the next time you log in.

Chess(NoAI) is a modification to Chess. It can only be played by human players, not AI players. Play proceeds normally, except that before every turn, the AI (chessbot level) chooses a move. This move becomes unplayable, and is greyed out on the board. If there is only one move available then it will not be greyed out.

You can read more about Noai on the wifight wiki, and also spectate Noai games on wifight.

There is no client upgrade required to play Chess(NoAI). Look for it in your Select Game screen.

wifight: new games on the horizon
First, we have Chess(NoAI). Chess(NoAI) is a modification to Chess. It can only be played by human players, not AI players. Play proceeds normally, except that before every turn, the AI (chessbot level) chooses a move. This move becomes unplayable, and is greyed out on the board. If there is only one move available then it will not be greyed out.

What I like about this variation is that it adds a bit of unpredictability. You can't be sure exactly what move chessbot will pick, but you can often guess. And it just might be the move you really wanted to make! So you have to get a bit creative and improvise a bit more. And you can try to take advantage, too. For example, you can often place a piece where you normally never would, since it would just be taken immediately...

Chess(NoAI) is almost ready to release. I'll probably make it go live this week. You won't need to upgrade your client. It will just magically show up in your Select Game screen.

Nextly, I started working on Reversi. Here's a work-in-progress screenshot: