Volity progress

Put a lot of work in for my pays-me-money client on Mon/Tue, but had ants in my pants about Ricky's visit taking up all my time this weekend, so broke pattern to work on the web client yesterday. While daerr is looking into the best solution to our proxying issue (so the necessary AJAX calls to a server running on a different port will work), I've been working on the JavaScript side of things, writing client-side code that talks to the Jabber-interfacing daemon I wrote last month. Yesterday got a basic AJAXy roster working, proof-of-concept enough to let me drop that and then attack the much more interesting problem of making a game table work.

Having tables done by the September deadline is looking real good. And it won't be a hardcoded hack, either; I'm fixing to implement the entire process, from the initial "new_table()" RPC sent to the game parlor (Volity's official tic-tac-toe test parlor, in this case) through the UI-file discovery and download process and finally to the full game-playing interface itself. And it's to the project's benefit that, hey, there are three web-compatible Tic Tac Toe UI bundles available now; this will encourage me to make user-driven UI-switching work.

What will not be done by the start of Q4 are the less interesting bits that are still necessary before we can call the whole deal beta. It will involve returning to and polishing up the roster, for one thing. It's kind of dopey that once the tables work, our next step will be to basically and blatantly rip off GTalk's interface for floaty chatty divs in order to support basic player-to-player messaging. But really, I know of no cleverer way around the problem. You will be able to talk to other players sitting at a game table with you, though; that's a fundamental part of any table's UI and I can't imagine cutting that corner.

Lethal! En, forcers! Player one! *bang*

Today's Wikipedia featured article is about fighting in hockey and I read the whole thing. I found it fascinating because I grew up in a hockey-loving house (by virtue of my brother Peter being in it) and watched and enjoyed countless Bruins games on television, and then went on to a hockey college and couldn't help but follow all our boys' (and, separately but lesserly, ladies') exploits there, and still I had no concept at all until now of NHL teams having unofficial "enforcer" players who protect the smaller players, punish perceived transgressions, and generally only fight with other enforcers. This is apparently a tradition far older than I.

I haven't followed or even thought much about hockey in years, and now it all seems rather bizarre for the reason the article states, that there's no other professional team sport in the western world that tolerates and even encourages on-field pugilistics like North American hockey. When I was a kid it seemed as natural as anything but now it strikes me as the output of unregulated testosterone poisoning, and simply distasteful. The purposeful and oddly abstract tackles and collisions in American football is just as physical but a hundred times more nuanced. (As is the checking and such in hockey, sure.)

(Subject line is what the arcade machine "Lethal Enforcers" would say when you put a quarter in and then started a one-player game, and otherwise has nothing to do with anything.)

Anonymous readers

Been seeing an increase in anonymous comments on my LJ lately. I know I have some small amount of google juice goin' on here but really I don't know who beyond my flist reads this thing.

The only anon poster I had for awhile was 'batman4050', a friendly acquaintance from Gameshelf-related circles. But people have been leaving topical but anonymous comments on old threads, and then someone anonymously questioned my getting emotional at a cartoon, so I'm starting to wonder who-all some of you are - if I actually do have random non-LJ readers and not just people who fly in on Google searches. Feel free to comment. (Also feel free to pick up a free LJ account or use OpenID or something; I'm far more likely to respond to your comments that way.)

Game neeeeews.

Checkers has been solved. It's the most complex game so far whose single perfect single strategy has been discovered.

What's more, you can play online against a bot that's running this algorithm, and you are guaranteed to never win. Even if you play as perfectly as it does, the best you can do is force a draw.

I love this stuff. (And who'd like to write the Volity bot version...?)

I'd say "Iorek can beat up Buckbeak" but it'd look like I was missing the point

I fear that my awesome kidlit-expert buddies' drunken snarling about Harry Potter is probably the only backlash I'm gonna see about all of this strangeness, I say, as I gesture around myself. (Other than griefers, but let us not count them.)

I shall read and expect to enjoy the book when the borrowing chain gets 'round to me, and am not totally free of my own little bit of plot speculation. But my goodness, this is the most tension I've ever seen gripping people in my peer group outside of a national election. I think maybe the last time I saw anything like this was around the last episode of M*A*S*H but I was too young to appreciate it at the time. And what this has that that didn't is a sense of real desperation, with many of my friends already half-panicked to get the book, race home, and read it as fast as possible before the forces of evil can spoil it for them. It is somewhat unsettling to see.

Mm. Also, it is kind of fun, isn't it.