BrenDevLog

wifight: a nifty milestone

Lucky 500! Congratulations (and welcome) to wifight's newest player, Hewadamith! And thanks to all the players for helping to make wifight awesome. You guys rock, and someday I will beat one of you at Chess. Someday.

new wifight feature! gamelist filtering

Check it out! The wifight client now features a spiffy new feature: gamelist filtering. With a little switcher bar that works with the Treo/Centro 5-way nav even.

The 'Your turn' tab really streamlines the play process. I'm pretty happy with how this feature turned out.

new wifight game: Drop 4!

Drop 4 is a clone of a classic boardgame. Take turns dropping coins onto a 7x6 grid of positions and try to get 4 coins of your color in a row before your opponent does.

That makes 6 game types now playable on wifight! And with 6 more variations on the main games. All of which are multiplayer, online, spectatable, and yummy-licious.

Play Drop 4, right now, for free, on wifight! You can play on PalmOS or Windows (or both!)

Thanks very much to players Nithya, Trgeoff, L1quid, and Edes for their extremely helpful pre-launch feedback on Drop 4 in this forum thread.

hlscript 0.5.6 posted

After about 2 years, it's time for another version of hlscript, the uberminimalist PHP blog engine that powers this blog. (And quite a few others.)

Here's what's new:

added call to addslashes() when writing a comment so DOS paths will display properly

added a bunch of isset() calls to reduce warnings in error log

added automatic Feedburner redirecting. Set $hls_rss_feedburner_redirect="MyFeedId" in config.php

added per-article comments enabling. Put "@@enable comments" on its own line somewhere in the article.

And also probably a good amount of tweaks and fixes that weren't big enough to notate at the time.

and in the fullness of time, wifight client 1.06

I just posted wifight client version 1.06. Lots of bug fixes, and some changes under the hood.

all: optimized purge old games operation, should be much faster now

all: improved selection code, clicking on a secondarily selected entity will toggle the selection, handles overlapping selection rects better

win32: hitting enter on login screen screename field jumps cursor to password field (like palm)

win32: hitting enter on login screen password field begins login process (like palm)

all: client now stores turn metadata, which will allow neat features like time limits and such in the future

palm: fixed a bug when new game creation returns an error

all: debugged initial fps display reading (try hitting the . key sometime)

Hot off the compiler!

And now, some work-in-progress, not-very-staged screenshots of two original games I'm developing for wifight. These games are kind of still in the prototype stage.

This shot was taken in the windows client's double-size mode. Vectory graphics rule! Dungeon's object-oriented environment is coming along. Lua is really nice for this. Dig my programmer art! I drew that demon dude in Inkscape.

Also double-sized. You can see the dudes are toting ridiculously oversized M16s, and that they have empty health. In fact they seem to be each losing one health point. Still programmer art, except the M16s, which are based on a decent clip art collection of guns I found on the web (Somewhere on clker.com I believe.)

wifight 1.05

Actually it's been out for a little while already, but wifight 1.05 is available for download. The biggest/bestest change is probably that the winclient now updates nice and quick like the Palm client does. And lots of bug fixes. Oh, and running in Classic Apps on the Pre is (basically) supported!

Here's Whats New in 1.05:

win32: optimized disk access during updating, much faster now

win32: '!' was being interpreted as arrow-up, fixed

all: cancelling game browser gamelist fetch didn't close the game browser, fixed

all: network code cleanup, fixed some potential bugs that might explain some weirdness

all: game screen jumps to latest turn end when tapped even if it is not your turn

palm: Pre Classic mode. And I thought supporting treo600s was a pain

all: after accepting a draw in the game details screen, the quit button now disappears as it should

all: made Disconnect menu option in Game Room screen do confirm popup like other screens

win32: added little ? help buttons to show user guide pages like PalmOS has

See you in the chat room!

wifight is 1.04 already!

Well, I have been elbow-deep in C++ land and cranking out client builds since 1.0, and following naturally upon the release of 1.01, 1.02, and 1.03 (which apparently I forgot to blog about, but were certainly worthy builds), we have... 1.04! I'm pretty happy with this build. Especially the new game title font in the game list. Check it out:
Download the latest wifight client (currently version 1.04) for Windows and PalmOS at get.wifight.com.

Here's Whats New in 1.04:

palm: fixed rare crash bug in progress popup

all: inverted text on hilited item for game browser too

all: "Delete game" option in gamescreen menu for completed games (instead of "Resign game")

win32: enabled keyboard shortcuts in menus like palm has

all: new chunkilicious font for game titles in game room screen

win32: window stays centered over old position when double-size is toggled

all: moved "PLAYER/SPECTATING" indicator in games archive list to the lower right

all: fixed game details popup bgcolor not matching color theme bgcolor

palm: fixed GPRS login popup coming up before progress popup paints

palm: game icon drop shadow wasn't showing up, fixed

palm: problem where once you turned off the screen it didn't want to come back on should be much better

all: updated inbuilt user guide to latest online version

all: fixed memory leak in select game screen

Thanks for all the feedback in the chat room! You can also read the past release notes for all versions.

And here's a random peek at how Dungeon's doing lately. Remember this one's a work in progress. I've just been working on it here and there while I work out some design ideas on paper. But you can see the room rendered in the background there, and how about those graph-paper-esque lines? What do you think?

wifight at 1.0: at long last

After actually-I-forgot-how-many-months-at-this-point, wifight is now at 1.0(!) AND supported on BOTH PalmOS and Win32. I ended up porting the port back to PalmOS, so now I have a nice portable OS-independent client app that compiles on both platforms. UI changes (most of them) just show up in both. It's nice.

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!

wifight on win32: status update

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.

wifight... on windows

wifight has been in alpha for quite some time now. In fact, total development time is now up to about 3 years as of this month! After 34 releases of the client software, I'd say it's time for beta. wifight.prc version 0.35 will be in fact a beta, not an alpha.

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.

wifight: another dungeon peek

You can see the rooms are now filled with a solid color. The treasure chest and blob now actually represent items in the room. The room graphics are still hardcoded. The inventory screen is actually representing inventory though. I'll probably make it display items in a tile pattern eventually. But I have 4 blobs and a treasure chest, so I'm doin' alright.

wifight reversi: new feature: running scores

I just added a neat (and often requested) feature to wifight's Reversi implementation:

Running scores! The numbers count up and down as the pieces flip. This feature will take effect in new games only, and kicks in on the first flip.