Pug’s Place

Gpremacy
I spent most of this week’s free time working on Gpremacy. I’ve implemented Blind Bidding and Turn Randomization, the last major features standing in the way of Gpremacy being a really playable game. The changes are in CVS but they are not ready for serious use yet. For some reason the server-side logic keeps failing at keeping track of who’s playing when. There has to be a subtle problem in the StateManager class. It’s not that big of a class and its job is pretty darn straight-forward, so I’m perplexed at where the error lies. I intended to spend this morning line-by-line debugging it but I was distracted by E.

When I get back from my Spring Break I’ll either do the debugging or simply re-implement the class and see if I get it right next time.

On the plus side, the client code keeps getting better and better. I’ve fixed a number of holes which would cause clients to lock up when connecting to the server. In fact, the only bug I’ve found in the last few days regarding that is so weird that it don’t even throw a useful exception - it just deadlocks. Anyway, I’ll track that one down once I get the Blind Bidding (and probably Loans) fully working.

I’m gearing up to make a serious release very soon - Loans won’t take long at all, and once they’re out of the way the only things not implemented will be Winning Conditions (easy), L-Sat Clashes, Orbital Nuclear Bursts and Amphibious Warfare. Amazingly, these things should all be rather simple, especially in comparison to the Blind Bidding (which required a rewrite of a bunch of the game state management). By “serious release” I mean the following:

• Windows Installer
• Linux Installer (using Autopackage)
• Straight binary (just in case)
• User Manual (already partly written!)
• Turn walk-through (not yet written)
• New website (partly done)
• Developer documentation (just beginning)

I’m also going to bump up to a proper version number this time - the next release will be 0.4.0.

It’s going to be good, very good.

Spring Break

But before I can finish that up, I’ll be heading off to Phoenix and Las Vegas for Spring Break. Yes, Vegas again — we’ll see if Chris can capture another wacky image of me in front of the Paris casino. I’m sure I’ll still be checking my email and cell phone, so you’ll still be able to get in touch with me, just not as quickly.

Finally
My final project for Concurrent Programming is to implement a multiplayer Internet Boggle game using Java. I wrote up a frighteningly complete UML diagram and functionality outline during class today so I think I can say that I’ve a good head start. Don’t worry folks, you’ll get to play this one too.

I anticipate becoming very good at Boggle before this semester is complete…