Life has panned out for me – work became extremely busy in the last few months, and my ever expanding role has ever expanded – and indeed shifted towards a more theoretical and management-style thang. I’ve been working directly with clients and producing a lot of exciting stuff for a lot of exciting projects which, if I get off my lazy arse and update this blog more often, you will no doubt hear about!

Another significant development is that I’m no longer a lonely geek sat in his room listening to chip music and writing Javascript – I’m a very much not lonely geek sat in his room listening to chip music and writing Javascript. I have indeed found a (dare I say it) lady geek – though to her credit, not even close to the caliber of my pure unadulterated nerdiness – whom I spend as much time with as my work and her sanity allows. I won’t allow myself to become soppy and embarrass her (and myself) but… well, I absolutely love you Julia, and you make me a very, very happy boy. Oh bugger, I don’t think I succeeded there. Never mind!

This has meant of course (yes, you all knew it!) that my personal projects have taken a back burner in all of this. Well, I say a back burner, but I actually mean ‘have been placed in tupperware tubs and frozen’. I must say now that my passion for Archaos in particular has not waned one bit – however after such a hiatus, I’d like to start a lot of it again rather than try and work my way back into the existing code base. A problem with learning as you create is that everything you did a month previous is a bit crap – so stuff I started last year is gonna be pretty goddamn terrible now.

I will return to Archaos. I absolutely promise I will, and I have been reading Gooey Blob and other Chaos related stuff. The end of the year always proves to be a better time to get on with personal projects, and I hope to have something playable in December.

To those of you who still read this, still follow me on my similarly neglected Twitter account, I salute you – and I’ll be around more often!

P.S. Check this out. WOW!

The home page of the website will be more like the Rotates.org of old, and will include links to current projects or items of interest. It’s been a blast putting it together with Tumblr’s fantastically simple template language and thanks to being able to edit the CSS and Javascript in realtime via Web Developer and Firebug. You can check on the progress of the new blog over at http://blog.rotates.org/ – have fun and let me know what you think!

Forgive the awful form and jQuery... it was quick!

{
  "turn" : 1,
  "phase" : "move",
  "interaction" : "sequence",
  "finished" : true,
  "actions" : [
    {
      "type" : "move",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1263682234,
      "data" : {
        "piece" : "p0",
        "path" : [
          {
            "x" : 1,
            "y" : 7
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "end_turn",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1263682234
    },
    {
      "type" : "move",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1263682234,
      "data" : {
        "piece" : "p1",
        "path" : [
          {
            "x" : 13,
            "y" : 5
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "move",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1263682234,
      "data" : {
        "piece" : "p3",
        "path" : {
          "x" : 11,
          "y" : 4
        },
        "flying" : true
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "end_turn",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1263682234
    }
  ]
}

I’d like to mention the huge amount of support, encouragement and fantastic resources provided by certain people of late. @andy_herbert has been a fantastic vocal advocate and provider of much inspiration and technical knowhow (he’s an utterly brilliant multi-talented programmer in his own right) and I owe an awful lot to his ‘cheery’ tone on Twitter!

Secondly, I’d like to shout out a big hello to the Slashdot horde, who accosted the site a few days back. I got a hell of a lot of visits from these guys and I’m sure it’s helped spread the word about Archaos (even if that wasn’t actually my intention) and more importantly the Chaos scene in general!

Finally, a big thanks to @Zolyx for mentioning the project on his blog along with the other fantastic Chaos projects out there – muchos appreciated!

For those interested in creating a client (and because the code isn’t yet ready for viewing!) here’s the current output of a test run on the server. Note that games, pieces and spells have a unique game ID, which is a letter followed by an incrementing numeric value. One of the current things I’m working on is cleaning up the code so all possible references are made to these UIDs, and not directly to the objects, as this will make things safer and more manageable within the engine at the expense of a little bit of performance (no doubt I’ll rewrite much of this at a later date so there are two ‘levels’ of code; the UID data-driven level that the users interact with, and the deeper object-driven stuff that processes things.

{
  "turn" : 1,
  "phase" : "select_spell",
  "interaction" : "all",
  "finished" : true,
  "actions" : [
    {
      "type" : "select_spell",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "spell" : "s0"
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "select_spell",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "spell" : "s6"
      }
    }
  ]
}

{
  "turn" : 1,
  "phase" : "cast",
  "interaction" : "sequence",
  "finished" : true,
  "actions" : [
    {
      "type" : "cast",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "spell" : "s0",
        "target" : {
          "x" : 0,
          "y" : 1
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "spawn",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "x" : 0,
        "y" : 1,
        "occupant" : {
          "uid" : "p2",
          "owner" : "lewster32",
          "properties" : {
            "movement" : 1,
            "combat" : 7,
            "defense" : 8,
            "maneuver" : 6,
            "resistance" : 4
          }
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "succeeded",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "spell" : "s0",
        "target" : {
          "x" : 0,
          "y" : 1
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "end_turn",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1262563476
    },
    {
      "type" : "cast",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "spell" : "s6",
        "target" : {
          "x" : 11,
          "y" : 1
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "spawn",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "x" : 11,
        "y" : 1,
        "occupant" : {
          "uid" : "p3",
          "owner" : "bobster16",
          "properties" : {
            "movement" : 1,
            "combat" : 6,
            "defense" : 5,
            "maneuver" : 2,
            "resistance" : 4
          }
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "succeeded",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "spell" : "s6",
        "target" : {
          "x" : 11,
          "y" : 1
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "end_turn",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1262563476
    }
  ]
}

These are what every player will receive at the end of each phase. They contain each action performed by the players in the order that they performed them, and timestamped for reference and backup purposes. Players have relatively limited access to the game in terms of actions, just like in the original game. A player may select spells, cast spells, move and attack pieces and end their turn. From these actions however, more actions may occur, so a player casting a spell on tile x will set off a chain of actions, where the server rolls against the spell’s chance, then (if successful) performs the spell’s effect, which may be to spawn a new piece or whatever.

Soon I’ll be locking down the format of these outputs, and documenting the errors and notices a user receives directly. This will allow for anyone wishing to do so to begin planning or working on a client – and I sincerely hope people do!

• Creating games
• Joining and leaving games
• Creating and moving pieces on the board
• Extensive move validation (bounds checking, path checking, engagement checking etc)
• A customisable turn/phase system (this has been an absolute pain in the arse to implement – but it appears to be working as intended now)
• Full JSON messaging system (you talk to the server in JSON and it talks back to you in JSON, there’re no sockets, special protocols or proprietary formats)

The Google Code wiki is somewhat out of date (already!) as things slot into place during development, and I’ll update it as things become more solid. I’m currently using a private SVN, though as the project nears a working first version (and if there’s any interest) I’ll be happy to give access to the SVN – there’s a lot of experience and expertise out there, and I’d greatly appreciate a second opinion on aspects of the code!

Lew: (Screaming) “MUHAHAHAHA!! IT’S ALIVE”

Ahem. Yes, I’ve been beavering away over the last few days and I can finally reveal a proper screenshot of some proper code doing something. Unfortunately, I’ve not started on a client yet, and I’m using a quickly thrown together browser-based console to work with it. However, it is a screenshot, and so I’ll upload it!

One of the fantastic bonuses of writing in Javascript is I have an interpreter with a great debugging suite at my disposal right from the outset with no messing on – Archaos’s core code is designed to run locally in a browser as well as server-side, and an adaptive messaging system will smooth the whole experience out so that what goes in and what comes out is the same wherever the clients or the servers are located.