Impending volity shtuff for YOU

[prog]

The betapalooza is this Thursday evening from 7 to 11. Come visit us in person at 2 Linden Ave (bringing a laptop if you can), or stay home and log in with Javolin. I posted the latest release of the client (0.3.0) yesterday. You should download and use that.

Yeah, we still have the same old games as the last two events. ONLY MORESO. Some (especially Fluxx) have received more bug-fixing and fine-tuning lately, and Javolin itself has lots of little new features and improvements that need testing.

So, turning to the issue of actually getting some new games on the system...

I am working today on bringing ALL of the Perl documentation up to date (including taking recent critiques from Bill and daerr into account), and providing clear, simple example code with that distribution.

I will then commence a push to start our developer-beta period with posts to both the volity-devel mailing list and this LJ (which is the closest thing we have right now to an official Volity blog, at least with the Volity-tagged posts). I know a lot of potential Volity game hackers are reading this (and are subscribed to the mailing list as well), and I hope to finally activate all of y'all with this. Stay tuned...

Comments

[queue.livejournal.com]

From previous Betpalooza experience, do you think people will stop playing at 11 or continue some more? I'm going to be in Pacific time zone, but it's possible I'll be free right near the end of the thing.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Come on by. Even if you can only play one game before everyone goes to bed it will be worth our time. Especially if you haven't used the system in a while!

[katre50.livejournal.com]

Will the documentation focus on the server-side or the UI-side? Having looked a few months ago (and at the python version, not the perl version), the server-side looked relatively easy, but trying to do what seemed to be a fairly simple UI was a nightmare. Mostly what I'd want is either a "best practices" document or a nice shiny javascript library with lots of UI.make_region(), region.add_image() calls or something, I guess.

Short version: I suck at visual design anyway. Someone want to implant that skill directly into my brain? Thanks!

[prog.livejournal.com]

Ah, noted.

The docs I'm writing right now are attached to the Perl modules, and Bill is working on a more general-purpose developer's guide that will cover the whole process, from carfting a ruleset API through writing referee code and finally to UI design.

Sadly, you will just have to bite the bullet and learn SVG, JavaScript, and the DOM in order to write a UI. There's no way around it. It's stuff that's all worth knowing, IMHO, and another thing I'm preparing is some concrete examples of setting up simple UIs for games like Tic Tac Toe. I will probably finish, post, and link to this before Bill finished his own opus, but we'll see.

Zarf started a page on the wiki a while ago meant to be a starting point for development, and I've started to modify it a bit. I think it will become very important soon. http://www.volity.org/wiki/index.cgi?Game_Developer's_Overview

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Actually I've thought a little bit about a way you could write a UI *without* learning SVG. What it would be -- nobody scream, please -- would be a UI file that provided the DOM API as RPCs.

This would be slow and painful. It would work, though.

[cnoocy]

Whee!