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Basketball season is underway, energizing players, fans, and software developers alike. Here are a few SourceForge.net projects that aren’t afraid to get aggressive on the court.

Ultimate Basketball Challenge is a pre-alpha simulation of the sport for your computer, with five on five play and tracking of player and team statistics. It’s nowhere near finished, but it is actively being developed.

If you have a Java Virtual Machine on your phone, you can get a basketball fix anytime, anywhere with Pocket Basketball. The graphics are rudimentary, but the game lets you try to shoot as many baskets as you can and prevent your opponent from scoring. It uses the dial pad to move your player around the screen.

We also have software for those who are a little more intimately involved with the sport. Basketball Coaches Management Tool gives coaches to tools to run everything from try-outs to tournaments. It tracks games and statistics, player information and player development.

PhpMySport is not b-ball-specific – it works for most team sports clubs and leagues. With it you can easily create and manage a web site, manage matches, seasons, players, and team compositions, post news, and host discussion forums.

If you want to use your computer and a projector for a basketball scoreboard, try Java ScoreBoard. It lets you keep a countdown clock, track the score, track fouls, play sounds, and even run a slide show.

Finally, if you’re more of a watcher than a player, especially of college basketball, the Tournament Pool and Bracket Tracker may interest you. This Java Servlet offers bracket entering, multiple scoring systems, and multiple users, groups, and pools.

webDiplomacy is a web game in which you fight over Europe with seven other players. It’s like Risk without the dice; you fight over territories with armies, and the more territories you have the more armies you have.

There are a few simplifications and a few differences between webDiplomacy and Risk:

Simplifications:
- All armies are the same strength: One army per territory.
- You have as many armies as supply-center territories, instead of getting new armies year by year.
- No luck is involved, no dice: You win fights when more neighboring armies support you than support the enemy. Both your armies and other players’ armies can support you.
- The aim is always to get half of the supply-center territories; there are no mission cards.

Differences:
- Everyone enters their moves in secret, and moves happen only when everyone has entered them; it’s not player by player like Risk.
- You can only build new armies where your first armies were built, in your country’s base territories.
- If an army loses a fight it can retreat.
- There are fleets, which are like armies, but they can go across sea/coast territories and not land, and can convoy armies across water.

The changes turn webDiplomacy into a game about cooperation and diplomacy, trust and bargaining, and trickery and deception, rather than luck and odds.

Australian student and developer Kestas Joe Kuliukas has been working on webDiplomacy since late 2004. The game is written in PHP. Kuliukas originally coded using Scite for simple code highlighting, but later turned to Eclipse PDT for auto-completion, with Xdebug on the server for debugging.

webDiplomacy development, like aspects of the game itself, is an exercise in collaboration. “Most of the work done on the software is done by people who have their own servers,” Kuliukas says. “Relatively little collaborative work is done directly on a single installation. This is convenient because it allows code to be properly tested before being integrated into the main release. The AGPL deserves credit for this; prior to the AGPL’s release the project used the BSD license, and webDiplomacy was plagiarized (breaking the BSD license) and no code was returned (which was unfortunate, but in line with the license). Since the AGPL was released, derivative sites share back code and everyone benefits.

“There are at least seven active servers: the official server at webdiplomacy.net, Facebook webDiplomacy; a Korean server; a custom server with alternate maps, rulesets and features; a Chinese server; and the server that plagiarized the code. Of these, Facebook webDiplomacy, the Korean server, and the custom server have had code re-integrated into official releases. A handful of people have also contributed patches directly into an official release.”

While the project’s version number makes it appear as if the game is in a late beta stage, that’s misleading. “The version number is tied to the year – 0.8x was 2008, 0.9x is 2009,” says Kuliukas. “I’d consider 0.80 to be the first non-beta release, but that’s with hindsight. Anyway, next year is 1.0, so never mind.”

webDiplomacy gives you lists of what each of your units can do. In this game snapshot, red is move/attempted move, yellow is support-move, green is support, blue is convoy, pink is retreat, a star means built, an explosion mean destroyed. Strategize with allies and enemies and enter your moves.

Among the planned enhancements for upcoming versions are a live chat feature and support for new variant maps, including many created by Oliver Auth. Players will also be able to enter orders via a point-and-click map instead of drop-down lists.

Kuliukas hosts the code for the game on SourceForge.net because “with SourceForge you can see how widely used and active something is, and can give feedback publicly; it gives a degree of confidence and transparency which I wanted for the project.” He publishes new release notices on freshmeat and Wikipedia, “though most users come from other installations or are linked via Facebook or forums.”

The game is pretty popular. “On the official server, the lowest number of players I’ve seen recently is 30 and highest is 130. Like any gaming server there are daily peaks and troughs. At the moment I’m writing this we have 1,366 players active in a game and 82 online, just on that one server.”

If you’d like to help out with such a popular project, the best place to talk about developing the code is forum.webdiplomacy.net. “The best way to get code in,” Kuliukas say, “is to set up a server with the changes and have people test it out, so it can be ported into the official code seamlessly.”