Webhack Announcements

Fields

2011-08-08T09:21:00.000-07:00

Anyone know a better way to ensure that a subclass defines a number of fields without forcing it through a constructor? Java doesn't permit an abstract field, which I'd forgotten about. The problem is that I may have up to 30 points of data, all numbers, and there's a pretty strong risk that I'll get a couple of them mixed up. What I'd like is in the class declaration to set them without marshaling them through a constructor call, but still have the compiler enforce that I have in fact set them all. This should all happen without copying and pasting the field definitions, etc. I can think of how I'd do this in a number of other languages, but not Java.

Enums, Classes

2011-08-07T08:49:00.000-07:00

I think I posted earlier about the problem I was having where if I make each monster and object it's own class that I then have to create a separate list of all of them since the code in several places will refer to objects as groups with index numbers. So, from MONNUM to MONNUM. I didn't want to maintain a separate list of objects, since without reflection it's very hard to associate something with an actual class. I opted instead for using an Enum, but that has the problems that not only do all the definitions have to be in one huge file, but for each type that has a slightly different constructor, I'm overloading it using another dummy class so that I can foo(int, int, int), from foo(int, int, int). I'm still having to put a crapload of data into a constructor that I can't read. It winds up looking like:

GLAIVE(new Weapon(), 45, "glaive", "single-edged polearm", false, false,
true, 8, 75, 6, 6, 10, 0, EnumSet.of(WeaponType.SLASH),
Skills.POLEARMS, Material.IRON),

RIN_SUSTAIN_ABILITY(new Ring(), 159, "sustain ability",
Property.FIXED_ABIL, "bronze", 100, true, false, 4, Material.COPPER),

etc.

The best part about taking a few months off of coding is coming back and saying "zOMG, how f'ing sleep deprived *WERE* you?" because when I look at these, I just want to close the laptop again and ignore it for another week. (This has happened once already)

Oh, and I have to do a new Ring() up there because you can't make an instance variable before the actual Enumerations, and I'm trying really hard to avoid globals so that I can eventually detangle this. Yuck, 'eh?

My goal this morning was to do something easy to work into webhack again, and I quickly got mired down in this. I think I'm going to move to something a little more hybrid like. Namely:

public Enum ObjectName {

GLAIVE(new Obj.Glaive),

RIN_SUSTAIN_ABILITY(new Obj.RingSustainAbility)

}

And then just delegate all the calls over.

As my daughter likes to say. "Yucky!"

What's up

2011-07-22T23:29:00.000-07:00

So, apparently moving, my son getting his tonsils out, working, and doing two master's courses at once meant that I didn't have time for this much lately. I've been itching to hack again. I still have a few weeks left in my courses, and I took some time to update eclipse and make sure I could still upload what I have already.

I haven't given up, though. =)

Bit of a break

2011-05-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

I've been taking a bit of a break from webhack hacking. I've started a couple Master's courses, found a new place to live, found a daycare for the kid and discovered Lord of Ultima: an MMORTS game played entirely through a web browser. What started off as curiosity to see how they did it has turned into many hours of evening fun.

However, I'm slowly finding myself getting bored of it, since it's time-based. What I love about hack and it's derivatives is the pure turned-basedness of it.

Today's push is mostly a GWT update, wherein they now claim (again) that IE9 is supported. Could someone please test it again?

I don't know what I'll work on next. Taking a few weeks off means that my brain has completely cleared state and I'm not even sure what's needed.

Oh, and I checked the analytics. Apparently this got a shout-out on some aggregator and we had a one-day peek of 300+ users. Crazy that there are that many people randomly hoping to play this. =)

g'n!

Sleep is for losers

2011-04-23T01:07:00.000-07:00

Or I could just deploy it. I'd forgotten about the fact that if you preventDefault on a keydown, the browser never triggers the keypress event.

So, keydown handles arrow keys and keys with modifiers.

keypress handles everything else.

It's working, and I've pushed it. Anyone have an '@' somewhere other than over the two? Everything should work right now.

Now it's really bed time. =)

Keyboard events. Again.

2011-04-23T00:20:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I've been puzzling through keyboard events the last few days. I decided I wanted to do something fun, like add new levels. Once again, encountered that things like < and > are hard to generate in a properly internationalized way.

I'm using a few documents as reference:

http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Events/#events-textevents
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-DOM-Level-3-Events-20060413/keyset.html#Guide
http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Events/#event-flow

There's a few things to note:

1) DOM3 isn't implemented anywhere at all yet. But keyboard stuff wasn't really formalized before this.
2) Keypress isn't documented (which does exist). Instead textInput replaces it, which isn't implemented everywhere and seems to only fire at each keystore in a textbox.

I *think* (and I'm documenting this without having actually tried it yet, so that I can come back to this and find my notes) that what I need to do is preventDefault on dead keys (ctrl, meta, alt, shift) only. This should stop those modifiers from hitting the browser. Then I think I can just watch keypress to actually just pick up the key that was hit and any modifiers.

As a side effect of this, hitting the shift key should no longer cause the monsters to move around the grid.

But it's taken me until 20 past midnight to come up with this. So, bedtime. =)

Renewed Domain until 2020

2011-04-18T23:53:00.000-07:00

I've renewed webhack.net until 2020.

Now to hopefully not take that long to get this thing finished. =)

Been crazy busy the last few days. Slowly getting back to Webhack.

Some maps now have vaults. You can see them with C-f. You can't get to them, and there's no money in them yet. Details, details. It was the most invasive work I've done with the map so far. Somethings it'll run into a road. Will fix that soon. Just happy to do a push again for the first time in a while.

Analytics

2011-04-13T10:11:00.000-07:00

I looked at the Analytics last night and was surprised to see 26 unique visitors. Did a little bit of digging ( - with help. Thanks enne!) and found that someone had linked to this on Spring Engine. Welcome visitors!

I replied with some information on where things are at, but it's neat to see people I don't know linking this to other people I don't know.

For interest, here's the post:

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=25813&p=481443

Little tweaks

2011-04-12T00:10:00.000-07:00

The hard part about taking a break is getting back into it. I love that Eclipse auto-updates. It needs to take a lesson from the auto-update-like-Chrome camp, rather than the auto-update-like-Windows camp. It took some time to get updated, but I'm now on the GWT 2.3 beta, the new GPE which allows it to finally cache my password, and some new Appengine SDK.

A little bit of time converting some consts to enums, a little bit of exposing some variables internally that had been hidden. I'm working on adding vaults as a side step to everything else.

The only actual visible change should be slightly higher compatibility with IE9. Someone let me know if it works?

Still around

2011-04-05T22:48:00.000-07:00

Hey - I'm still around. After my last post, pretty much everyone in the family got sick and we're only just on the mend. I haven't had a lot of time, so I've been keying in new items when I've had a moment. Most of the weapons are now defined.

Probably another week before I'm really back to it.

Demoed Webhack at work today

2011-03-30T22:32:00.000-07:00

Work has a "Beer and Demos" session on Wednesdays, and by request I demoed Webhack there today. Generally positive reviews. Fun to actually start showing this to a larger audience.

Home life has been busy the last few days with not a lot of sleep. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be back at it.

Next up: More items, being able to drop some, and getting more than 1 xp per monster kill.

Java lesson

2011-03-27T21:49:00.000-07:00

One this about this project is that my Java knowledge is getting better and better. Today's thing was learning that an enum not only has the methods of it's defining class, but it can also override them. Take this example:

public enum Foo {
FOO,

BAR {
@Override
public String wubble() {
return("Double Wubble");
}
},

BAZ;

public String wubble() {
return("Wubble");
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(FOO.wubble());
System.out.println(BAR.wubble());
System.out.println(BAZ.wubble());
}
}

I'm sad that I can't define these enums in separate files, since this is going to get uglier than I'd hoped. Some of my enums look like this now:

ELVEN_SHORT_SWORD(new Weapon(), 30, "elven short sword", "runed short sword", false, false, false, 2, 30, 10, 8, 8, 0, EnumSet.of(WeaponType.PIERCE), Skills.SHORT_SWORD, Material.WOOD),

and doing method overrides isn't going to make them prettier. Lack of reflection in GWT make the more straightforward method of using classes impossible, though.

Not a lot of hacking this evening or next, just testing some new ideas.

Entering items, Experience

2011-03-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

I'm keying in all of the objects into webhack which is tedious and boring. I'm promising myself that I'll do a bunch of that before doing something more interesting. And wow, is it boring. I'm not even bothering to expose these in the dungeon since I'll be able to put in the finalish code for that when I'm done.

I decided that for the fun thing, I would make the character accumulate experience points. However, I haven't converted monsters over to working like Objects are, an ran into a set of problems.

Not to be deterred, I put in a hack that you get 1 xp per thing you kill. A bit anticlimactic, but all the plumbing works and this should be easy to fix when I convert the monsters. Sometime after I'm finished the objects.

g'n!

Amulets and Inventory

2011-03-21T23:35:00.000-07:00

There are now amulets appearing all around the dungeon, and inventory now assigns letters to items.

I know the inventory is slightly broken, though. I've hardcoded it to always assign 'a', so it also means that when you pickup the second item, the first one is gone. Will fix tomorrow. =)

Travel by mouse in single-steps

2011-03-19T23:30:00.000-07:00

Travel by mouse is implemented now for single steps. I haven't done anything about putting in multi-commands yet, but when using a mouse, you can click on a spot over and over again and as long as the character knows a path to get there, it will get done.

I opted to do this because when debugging, sometimes I need to just be in one part of the dungeon. When running GWT under eclipse in debugging mode with Chrome, it can be quite laggy. Just clicking over and over on the spot I want to go to is just fine for me and will remove one of the testing annoyances I have.

Next stop, probably back to inventory and object handling.

Mousing

2011-03-17T23:43:00.000-07:00

The mouse can now be used to navigate to the square beside you. The next step is the long distance pathing logic, which uses several gotos in C. I'll have to be getting more sleep to redo that, so for now... Good night!

But first! Google Analytics tells me that between 1 and 5 of you are checking the site everyday (and that's outside of me checking it after I upload) Thanks, whoever you are. =)

"travel" in Nethack

2011-03-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

So, there are disadvantages to not actually *playing* this game that I'm porting. My lovely lady knows the answers to the questions I have, but I have to know how to ask them.

Today's discovery is that there's a flag that can be set at runtime called "Travel" which indicates if a mouse click takes you a single step in a direction, or takes you all the way there. That sets iflags.travelcmd, which then causes a series of other effects. All handy if you happen to know the variable is set to TRUE by default.

That said, I now at least understand why this code works, which I didn't earlier. I'm not going to get further tonight but at least I can read this post tomorrow and save myself an hour or so. =)

Canvas instead of CanvasElement

2011-03-13T23:33:00.000-07:00

GWTs handling of Canvas is tentative and not optimal in a few ways. I'd worked around this in various ways before: Originally by ignoring GWT and using JSNI to manipulate it. Then GWT supported it, and I just gleaned it as a CanvasElement, and that worked well enough. Yesterday I wanted to attach a mouse event to that, and it turns out that you can't really, so I needed to finally rework it in terms of the full GWT Canvas class. The results should be completely invisible at the moment, but means that soon it will be possible to click around the map to get to where you want to go.

I'll let you know when that's done. I'm curious if it would work for navigation on an iPad. =)

In other news, I've updated to AppEngine SDK 1.4.2, and got confirmation from a from that this does, in fact, work on WebOS. =)

Sleep, and tomorrow more boxes to unpack...

No updates for a bit

2011-03-06T00:19:00.001-08:00

Finally found a new place to live, we'll be moving over the next week and unpacking after that. It'll probably be a couple of weeks until the next update.

Analytics

2011-03-03T00:14:00.000-08:00

I'm adding some more analytics to the site. I've heard from a few people that they're play testing, and now I'm curious how many people, how long the games are, etc.

Also, I'm taking a break from making objects and am back on the vision system. Most of the work is hidden behind a flag, so there shouldn't be anything visible.

New command 'i' for inventory; CSS

2011-03-02T00:09:00.000-08:00

The 'i' command for inventory is now implemented. It doesn't do a GUI popup yet, but will display a list of all the items picked up in the text window.

I also eliminated the webhack.css file today, and switched to the style where it's embedded in the UIBinder script. Something I want longer-term is for this game to be completely skinnable. That way if someone wants to implement a terminal look-alike mode, it's an option to do so, or a webgl mode, or a handset mode, etc.

Some of the styling got lost while I did that. It was wrong anyway, though, so I'm not that worried.

New command ':', noticing objects, autopickup

2011-02-28T22:27:00.000-08:00

I wired up a new command ':' this evening that lists all the objects on the ground in your current square. Writing this also made it possible to write the bit where Webhack comments on the objects in the square as you pass it by. Now, if you also turn autopickup on '@', then the objects will get picked up, too.

Well, sort of. I haven't written the inventory stuff, so aside from Gold, they get vaporized, same as when you pick up with the ',' key. That's next.

Sorry about the grammar. I need to go to bed early tonight and wanted to quickly wire this up so that there was a few more ways to interact with the objects.

g'night!

Getting rid of JSNI

2011-02-25T23:31:00.000-08:00

No visible changes over the last few days doesn't mean no changes! Now that GWT 2.2 has been released, I've switched from using JSNI, which risked load-time race conditions depending on reordering (GWT 2.1 couldn't be used because of this) and implemented all the canvas and text output routines with Java.

On the objects front, I've defined three new weapon types, and will start to create those over the weekend. There will probably be another week before there are visible changes while I do the long sets of data entry needed to get all the objects defined.

Making progress

2011-02-21T00:03:00.000-08:00

I can tell that I'm making progress in this game because porting the code is getting easier. As part of implementing the inventory bits, I needed to tweak a bunch of the display code that I had kludged together early on to get anything displaying at all. How I often go about this is I start by pasting in a C function into where I think it fits in the Java code, turning it into Java, removing anything that I don't have implemented, and then I chew on the rest until it does what I needed it to. Many of the routines I re-did required to stubbing out at all and JustWorked(tm).

Nice to start to have that happen.

Also, I got a comment the other day from someone asking about WebOS support. It turns out that a friend of mine works on WebOS. I still don't have a clue about what would be a good UI for a mobile device, but I learned a bit about their environment, what they expect from devices, etc. and might be able to get access to one to try it out for an hour or two.

Neat stuff. Taking a break now to mash on the UI code in prep for acquiring and displaying inventory. Tonight's upload brings rings as well the food.

Foodstuff

2011-02-18T23:14:00.000-08:00

Doing the rest of the food was surprisingly easy, as was getting the probability-weighted randomize. The dungeon now has an assortment of food rather than just trip lying around.

While it's easy, it's also a fair amount of data entry to do, so I'll probably beat on that over the long weekend and then spend some of next week fixing up the inventory command so that you can actually pick them up and put them down again. You'll be able to tell how far I'm getting by what's appearing in the dungeon. =)