A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

If you're coming to betatest in person tonight, try to bring a laptop if you can; our token Intel PC is still dead, so we have fewer courtesy computers than before. (This despite the generous donation of a hard drive from lediva; it turns out we had a bum motherboard. A new one is en route.) Folks can use our office Macs if it comes down to it, of course.

I just picked up two piping-hot guest parking cards from the city, which means that I don't have three, or indeed any number greater than two, for two's all they give ya. So drive if you must, and I shall endeavor to accomodate. (Rumor has it that I can nullify parking tickets that guests receive, but rumor also has it that this is hard to actually do.)

If you can't make it in person, log in to the system between 7pm and 11pm eastern and find it crawling with activity. Info as always at http://volity.org/betatesting.html . In the past we've had great success with a mix of both kinds of players. Just hang out in the devchat.

However you plan on playing, please go download brand-new version 0.3.1 of Javolin first; it's so new that as I write this the packages are still uploading from my Mac to our server. (Update: they're done now.) The most important change from 0.3.0 is an improved invitation system that radiotelescope devised, which should eliminate the need for people to be on your roster before you could invite them to a table. Previous betapaloozas showed us that, while this looked fine on paper, it was confusing and awful to actually use. We look forward to seeing how well this new way works.

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There has been a surge in activity from total strangers since I posted a testing request to Looney Labs' Fluxx mailing list. This has actually been great; several people have been playing Fluxx over and over (usually against bots), and occasionally filing new tickets for us. Our favorite one so far was filed by a player who discovered a way in which the Fluxx ruleset itself is broken!

This player and a bunch of bots got the game into a state where both the draw and discard piles were empty (meaning that some players were hoarding cards and not playing any Hand Limit rules, which is a bad habit of our current bots), and a bot played Draw 2 and Use 'Em. OK, well, the draw pile is out, so let's reshuffle the discard pile into it. Oh, look, I drew Draw 2 and Use 'Em. OK, well, the draw pile is out, so let's reshuffle the discard pile into it. Oh, look...

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So how about that there developer beta? I have two or three discrete bits of programming to accomplish still, and then I need to perform some release engineering. I am predicting that the betapalooza (plus this cold I have) will preclude me from finishing today, but I am hell-bent on getting it all wrapped up before Saturday.

I plan on making this the first release to the CPAN of the Perl stuff. This is actually exciting, and a big step.

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Volity is kicking butt. We need to start thinking about money again, soon.

Today was all video games and attempts at Javolin release-engineering. Wading around in Java code is one thing, actually trying to package the stuff up for public consumption is quite another. The thing about Java applications is that their end-products have so many different morphologies; we may end up releasing, all under the same version-number banner:

• a .jar file containing only the Volity project's original code & resources


• a .jar file containing both original stuff and third-party libraries


• a .jnlp file that will magically do the right thing via Java Web Start (I have my doubts about this; I've rarely seen it work right on a Mac!)


• a Mac .dmg file, containing a Mac OS X-ready application


• a Windows executable (though I personally have no clue how to make these)


• a Linux executable (? or maybe the jar file is enough)

At any rate, we're inches away from the first Javolin release. While it's still far from fit for use by the casual gamers we see as our core userbase, it is complete enough for game developers to start using, and that's really cool.

Once this has floated I plan on starting to write a development tutorial. I sorta wrote one last year (currently online as the Volity Developer's Guide), but I don't think I went far enough with it; it was more of a narrative than the step-by-step-with-figures-and-exercises deal that I'm envisioning now. It will be a challenge; I've never written something like that before. Everything I write tends to turn into a windy narrative, no matter how technical a mindset I try to wear.