ardanet-developers Mailing List for Ardanet

SourceForge Headquarters 225 Broadway Suite 1600 San Diego, CA 92101 +1 (858) 422-6466

Team,

I'll be at Gencon (Indianapolis) this weekend and will spread word of
Ardanet at the MECCG events (we have 1 scheduled each day).

--Josh

MySQL is opensources, as is Postgres SQL.  Either one we can use for free.
I have much more experience with MySQL.

The main thing I love about SQL is the portability.  You can use it in any
of the applications, so like you said, we can have a front-end on the
website that searches it, and an interface in the game.  It just makes
accessing the same data easier because then we only have to update 1 source
with any changes instead of changing it in multiple locations.

--Josh H.

On 8/8/07, Ris Misner <rm...@ne...> wrote:
>
>  I looked at random example cards in each of those 3 websites to compare
> the way they show the information.
>
>
>
> Of those 3, the one I liked the best was this one:
> http://www.swccgpc.com/wiki/index.php?title=3DMajor_Haash%27n.  It has th=
e
> basic structure I had in mind, but of course I would add lots more
> subsections=85
>
>
>
> However, the http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/ site starts to approach the
> card search engine I'd like to build into Ardanet, so it also makes a goo=
d
> example of the kind of stuff I have in mind.
>
>
>
> I can imagine a super-powerful tool if we could combine those two sets of
> functionality =96 the ability to search the cards with an interface like
> http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/ and then click on the results to get inf=
o
> that is detailed like
> http://www.swccgpc.com/wiki/index.php?title=3DMajor_Haash%27n.
>
>
>
> The last one http://cards.swccgpc.com/  doesn't have enough info IMO - al=
l
> it shows is the card name, a scan of the card, and the rarity.  But it ma=
kes
> me think it is important to have access to a simplified view like this fo=
r
> when you don't need all the extra info, so Ardanet should support this ki=
nd
> of interface too.  Ideally, the user could customize how much info to sho=
w
> in the summaries shown from the search results, and then clicking would
> always take you to a more detailed page like
> http://www.swccgpc.com/wiki/index.php?title=3DMajor_Haash%27n.
>
>
>
> Now this all gets me thinking=85
>
>
>
> We planned a searchable card database for Ardanet already.  It's necessar=
y
> data.  We had planned to implement this data as a proprietary file format
> using custom C++ data structures, a sort of do-it-yourself card database,=
 in
> order to have maximum control over the way the data was organized and how=
 we
> implemented the searches.  Also because I've never written SQL code befor=
e
> :P  But I am starting to think that SQL may be a better way to go, for
> reasons I will get into, so let's discuss this=85
>
>
>
> Rather than focus a lot of effort on developing web-based documentation
> for all this info, maybe we should focus on the card database interface t=
hat
> will eventually be in-game, and make it also serve as the help system, an=
d
> the rules database!  This would enable the in-game card database to inclu=
de
> self-contained links to the actual rules, and we could also use Ardanet
> (read: bug test Ardanet) while entering all the info we would otherwise
> enter into the wiki or Josh H's MySQL database or any of these other
> websites.  I mean, to spend all this time entering all this info, we shou=
ld
> do it in a way that can be used at play-time by Ardanet.
>
>
>
> Also, I'm intrigued that you already have a lot of info a MySQL database,
> which sounds like a very good starting point for what I'm suggesting=85
>
>
>
> Another thought I have is that=85 Josh H is doing MySQL stuff with PHP to
> make websites=85 we can do MySQL stuff with C++ or .NET to implement the =
game
> play in Ardanet =85 hmmm=85 can they share the same database file?  Presu=
mably
> yes.  Most of the same SQL statements too I would imagine=85 So it sounds=
 to
> me like it would be a good idea to share a SQL database between Ardanet a=
nd
> a web-based search engine which yields results with details like
> http://www.swccgpc.com/wiki/index.php?title=3DMajor_Haash%27n which I ass=
ume
> we can render in any custom interface on either a website or in Ardanet. =
 In
> my ignorance of SQL programming, I think it's just a matter of adding dat=
a
> fields to include all the extra info we want, in order to reference the
> additional sections we'd want to put on wiki pages like references to the
> rules, examples, walkthroughs, strategy tips, errata, card stats,
> everything.  The rules themselves should be able to go in a separate tabl=
e
> within the same SQL database, using a different format for the columns an=
d
> records in the rules table than in the card info table, right?
>
>
>
> We wanted to make the card database editable, searchable, and detailed
> within Ardanet anyway, in our runtime data, so I'm thinking we should mak=
e
> this the first priority for the user interface windows (after I figure ou=
t
> dockable frames as a general framework issue, or even before that) and ma=
ke
> both the card database viewer, searcher, and editor windows, as well as t=
he
> game rules viewer, searcher, and editor windows, and do all those windows
> before we get into the game-play windows.  We need the data at runtime
> before we can render it in game-play windows anyway, and if we use SQL, i=
t
> seems like we should be able to share all the data between a web interfac=
e
> and the Ardanet in-game interfaces.  Does that make sense?  Does it sound
> like a good idea?
>
>
>
> I think both of you know more about SQL than I do.  What do you think of
> this approach?
>
>
>
> The two main drawbacks I see are that I've never done anything with SQL
> before, and also that I've never done anything with SQL before.  LOL.  Bu=
t I
> can learn=85
>
>
>
> What about licensing, can we use it for free?  I assume there's something
> available somewhere that we're allowed to use in an open-source project,
> right?
>
>
>
> -- Ris
>
>
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> *From:* ard...@li... [mailto:
> ard...@li...] *On Behalf Of *Josh
> Hunholz
> *Sent:* Monday, August 06, 2007 1:53 PM
> *To:* Developer discussion
> *Subject:* Re: [Ardanet-developers] Project Roadmap
>
>
>
>
>
>  Funny you should mention this one too...I'm currently working on this as
> a tool. :)
>
>
>
> Again, awesome!  I'd love to take a look at what you've done with that so
> far, do you have a link I can visit?
>
>
> I've gone back and forth in my mind with how I want to implement this: a
> wiki or a database.  There are advantages to both.  As a wiki, we can sho=
w
> Card of the Day articles that are for that card, as well as strategy tips=
,
> decks built around the card, and lots of other things like that.  As a
> database, it's easy to integrate into the forums on councilofelrond.organ=
d
> meccg.net (which was my original goal).  Here are the two sites I'm
> modeling it after:
>
> http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/
> http://www.swccgpc.com/wiki/index.php?title=3DMain_Page
> http://cards.swccgpc.com/
>
> The second site, the Star Wars CCG (decipher game) Player's Committee
> site, has both a database and a wiki, which is cool.
>
> I had started working on code for the database, then realized I should
> come up with the database structure before I went too far with it.  So
> currently I have a lot of the info in a mysql database, but still haven't
> gotten around to making a nice view for it.
>
> Okay, I've gotta get back to work, but wanted to get some updates out on
> this stuff.
>
> --Josh
>
>
>
>
>
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> _______________________________________________
> Ardanet-developers mailing list
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>
>

Cool, this all sounds great to me.

-- Ris

  _____  

From: ard...@li...
[mailto:ard...@li...] On Behalf Of Josh
Hunholz
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2007 1:43 PM
To: Developer discussion
Subject: Re: [Ardanet-developers] website update

Okay, sorry I haven't responded to this sooner...work's been busy lately.
See my replies below:

On 7/31/07, Ris Misner < rm...@ne... <mailto:rm...@ne...> >
wrote:

Hi Josh H,

Thanks for setting this up!  I browsed over to the new site today and
registered there so I could take a look around.  I like the look of it very
much but I have a couple of questions/concerns/change requests.

No problem! That was the plan...get it up so we can critique it and figure
out what we want to change. 

First, since you mentioned running into problems with your permissions on
sourceforge, I enabled you as a project admin, so you should have full
priveleges now.  I don't mind continuing to host your new site at
ardanet.hunholz.com or back on sourceforge, the host location makes little
difference to me.  But I wanted to make sure you won't run into more
restrictions on sourceforge for any reason, just to keep things moving
smoothly.  The sourceforge user permission management is limiting, not
offering any "web developer" role, and didn't offer me any way to increase
your permission level for web development purposes only, so I just checked
the project admin box which should give you access to everything.

I don't think the issues were that my user didn't have permissions on
sourceforge, but rather how they have their web server set up.  I talked
with a few other people who have hosted with sourceforge, and they all say
sourceforge is pretty strict on what the apache user can access, etc.  The
issue was once I got the site up there, apache/phpBB wanted some tools and
access to some files that their server didn't want to give it.  I messed
with it for a while, and even tried to do the install on my server and then
move the site over.  But then it was complaining that it couldn't get the
right path to the tools.  As long as everyone is fine with it being hosted
on my server, I'm content to leave it there.  

Is it still in your plans to add Bugzilla to the site?  We don't need a
serious bug tracker very soon, but I'd like to eventually get one up and
running rather than use a less organized forum in order to track the
revision history of a bug, link duplicates together, assign
responsibilities, mark them as closed, etc.  We can do all that "by hand"
with a Bugs forum like you set up, but I think Bugzilla would be more
powerful.  Would it still be possible to set that up at some point?  (I
don't actually have much experience with Bugzilla and I'm always open to
opposing opinions)

Yes, I do plan to add Bugzilla some time soon.  I hadn't added it before
because sourceforge doesn't seem to place nice with it, as all its files are
.cgi (perl code) and not php.  I may not have been putting them in the right
spot either, but I couldn't seem to get it working, so I didn't set it up.
Now that I'm hosting on my server, I can easily add this. 

On the new portal ( http://ardanet.hunholz.com/bb3portal.php ) I would like
to add links to some more useful pages

-          the "Project Summary Page for Developers"
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/

-          the Ardanet wiki on sourceforge
http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/

-          the mailing list info and archives
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=192968

I'll get these added soon.

What about the "tasks" area on sourceforge?
http://sourceforge.net/pm/?group_id=192968  The idea for this area is to
keep track of who is doing what for the project, how far along they are, and
when they think they'll be done.  As the project leader, I find it important
to have something like this, especially given the "on again / off again"
nature of projects like this where each of us may be likely to take breaks
from it for weeks at a time now and then (such as I did recently leading up
to Worlds this past weekend).  Do you guys like this feature?  Would you
ever use it?  Should we use the one that comes with Sourceforge, or use
something else?  Or just report on our progress to the mailing list and
leave it at that?  I want you guys to have access to update that kind of
info yourselves, but I assume that as the project leader, I will do most of
the maintenance on keeping the info updated.  Do you think it's useful to
put a link to it on the portal ( http://ardanet.hunholz.com/bb3portal.php )
?  Or should we leave it as-is so that you have to go through the project
summary page to get there (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/) ?  Or
should I just disable/hide it?

I like sourceforge's  task area, so I'm happy with leaving it as that and
linking the portal back to sourceforge for that.  Since you're the leader,
it's really whatever you're most comfortable with anyway. :) 

Along those lines, I also intend to keep track of a "project roadmap
document" in the wiki, which will show up here:
http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/Project+Roadmap.  When I get around to
writing it up (probably later today, definitely by the end of the week) the
project roadmap will list the upcoming project goals similar to how I have
announced them in the News area in the past, but looking farther into the
future (and all of the planned features listed in the roadmap will link to
other wiki pages describing those features' design and implementation
details)  I'll keep the roadmap updated as we meet the various goals to show
what has been done and what remains.

Does the project roadmap make a separate "tasks" area unnecessary, or is it
still useful to separately track task assignments, who is working on what,
how far along they are, and when they expect to complete?  Or should we just
write that added info into the wiki pages?  Or is this kind of formal
tracking of task assignments and progress too much unnecessary hassle for
such a small team to bother with?

I think having a separate tasks area is good, for assigning different tasks
to different people.  The project roadmap is more of a way to have a "big
picture" view of how things are going, where the tasks give assignments
("small pictures") to the team members.  That's how I view it at least. 

Does the new forum support avatar images and more detailed profiles so we
could define our roles in our profiles?  It's unnecessary fluff I admit, but
if it's only a simple a matter of turning on a switch, then I would vote do
it.  But if it would take any significant work, then I would say don't
bother.

Yep, avatars are supported. I'm not sure if I enabled them or not.  If I
didn't, I will flip the switch later this week to turn them on. 

On the project summary page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/ ) we
have a link in a drop-down menu to Project > Web Site, which currently links
to http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/  I thought I saw something in the project
admin settings where you can redirect this link, so I'm looking for it, and
will redirect it to http://ardanet.hunholz.com/ if/when I find that option
again.  However, I gave away some of our cards at Worlds with the
http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/ address on them, so I want to make sure that
address continues to work, if even as an auto-redirect to
ardanet.hunholz.com.

Yeah, my thoughts exactly.  I think we should always use
ardanet.sourceforge.net as a static link to wherever it's hosted.  That way
we have a constant that doesn't change, if the web space ever does. 

That's all the comments I have on the website for now.  GREAT JOB and thanks
again for setting it up in time for Worlds.  I will follow up with a
separate note about my experience at Worlds 2007 this past weekend.

Best Regards,

Ris

  _____  

From: ard...@li...
[mailto:ard...@li...] On Behalf Of Josh
Hunholz
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 12:50 PM
To: Developer discussion
Subject: [Ardanet-developers] website update

Team,

After much fiddling around with the SourceForge webspace, and having little
success for a few reasons (some permissions issues, as well as their having
older version of key tools like PHP), I set the site up on my web server and
put a link on the ardanet.sourceforge.net site.  I have no problem hosting
the site there, as long as it's okay with the rest of you guys.  In fact, we
could register ardanet.com/org/net (whichever you prefer) and point it to
the server.  For now, you an access it either by going to
ardanet.sourceforge.net and following the link, or by going to
ardanet.hunholz.com directly.

As far as the software, I'm using PHPbb3 with the "Portal mod" that gives
the main page more of a website feel and lets us have a lot of control in
customizing it.  My original thought was to make a site, and then just
integrate the forum and a bug tracker, but I think this works for us just as
well.  I've also put in the comments from the posts on the Sourceforge
boards, so it has the same info. 

The admin account on the forums is username admin and password (same as
password Ris sent me for Mysql on Sourceforge. I won't put it in this note
since it can be accessed publicly.  Send me a note if you need it and I'll
reply with it).  If we all create accounts on the site, we can all have
admin access and that will list us as "team members".  

Okay, my lunch is over so I'm back to work, but wanted to get this info out
to the list as soon as I could.

--Josh <><

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_______________________________________________ 
Ardanet-developers mailing list
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I looked at random example cards in each of those 3 websites to compare the
way they show the information.

Of those 3, the one I liked the best was this one:
http://www.swccgpc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Major_Haash%27n.  It has the
basic structure I had in mind, but of course I would add lots more
subsections.

However, the http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/ site starts to approach the
card search engine I'd like to build into Ardanet, so it also makes a good
example of the kind of stuff I have in mind.

I can imagine a super-powerful tool if we could combine those two sets of
functionality - the ability to search the cards with an interface like
http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/ and then click on the results to get info
that is detailed like
http://www.swccgpc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Major_Haash%27n.

The last one http://cards.swccgpc.com/  <http://cards.swccgpc.com/>  doesn't
have enough info IMO - all it shows is the card name, a scan of the card,
and the rarity.  But it makes me think it is important to have access to a
simplified view like this for when you don't need all the extra info, so
Ardanet should support this kind of interface too.  Ideally, the user could
customize how much info to show in the summaries shown from the search
results, and then clicking would always take you to a more detailed page
like http://www.swccgpc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Major_Haash%27n.

Now this all gets me thinking.

We planned a searchable card database for Ardanet already.  It's necessary
data.  We had planned to implement this data as a proprietary file format
using custom C++ data structures, a sort of do-it-yourself card database, in
order to have maximum control over the way the data was organized and how we
implemented the searches.  Also because I've never written SQL code before
:P  But I am starting to think that SQL may be a better way to go, for
reasons I will get into, so let's discuss this.

Rather than focus a lot of effort on developing web-based documentation for
all this info, maybe we should focus on the card database interface that
will eventually be in-game, and make it also serve as the help system, and
the rules database!  This would enable the in-game card database to include
self-contained links to the actual rules, and we could also use Ardanet
(read: bug test Ardanet) while entering all the info we would otherwise
enter into the wiki or Josh H's MySQL database or any of these other
websites.  I mean, to spend all this time entering all this info, we should
do it in a way that can be used at play-time by Ardanet.

Also, I'm intrigued that you already have a lot of info a MySQL database,
which sounds like a very good starting point for what I'm suggesting.

Another thought I have is that. Josh H is doing MySQL stuff with PHP to make
websites. we can do MySQL stuff with C++ or .NET to implement the game play
in Ardanet . hmmm. can they share the same database file?  Presumably yes.
Most of the same SQL statements too I would imagine. So it sounds to me like
it would be a good idea to share a SQL database between Ardanet and a
web-based search engine which yields results with details like
http://www.swccgpc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Major_Haash%27n which I assume
we can render in any custom interface on either a website or in Ardanet.  In
my ignorance of SQL programming, I think it's just a matter of adding data
fields to include all the extra info we want, in order to reference the
additional sections we'd want to put on wiki pages like references to the
rules, examples, walkthroughs, strategy tips, errata, card stats,
everything.  The rules themselves should be able to go in a separate table
within the same SQL database, using a different format for the columns and
records in the rules table than in the card info table, right?

We wanted to make the card database editable, searchable, and detailed
within Ardanet anyway, in our runtime data, so I'm thinking we should make
this the first priority for the user interface windows (after I figure out
dockable frames as a general framework issue, or even before that) and make
both the card database viewer, searcher, and editor windows, as well as the
game rules viewer, searcher, and editor windows, and do all those windows
before we get into the game-play windows.  We need the data at runtime
before we can render it in game-play windows anyway, and if we use SQL, it
seems like we should be able to share all the data between a web interface
and the Ardanet in-game interfaces.  Does that make sense?  Does it sound
like a good idea?

I think both of you know more about SQL than I do.  What do you think of
this approach?

The two main drawbacks I see are that I've never done anything with SQL
before, and also that I've never done anything with SQL before.  LOL.  But I
can learn.

What about licensing, can we use it for free?  I assume there's something
available somewhere that we're allowed to use in an open-source project,
right?

-- Ris

  _____  

From: ard...@li...
[mailto:ard...@li...] On Behalf Of Josh
Hunholz
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2007 1:53 PM
To: Developer discussion
Subject: Re: [Ardanet-developers] Project Roadmap

Funny you should mention this one too...I'm currently working on this as a
tool. :)

Again, awesome!  I'd love to take a look at what you've done with that so
far, do you have a link I can visit?

I've gone back and forth in my mind with how I want to implement this: a
wiki or a database.  There are advantages to both.  As a wiki, we can show
Card of the Day articles that are for that card, as well as strategy tips,
decks built around the card, and lots of other things like that.  As a
database, it's easy to integrate into the forums on councilofelrond.org and
meccg.net (which was my original goal).  Here are the two sites I'm modeling
it after: 

http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/
http://www.swccgpc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://cards.swccgpc.com/  <http://cards.swccgpc.com/> 

The second site, the Star Wars CCG (decipher game) Player's Committee site,
has both a database and a wiki, which is cool.  

I had started working on code for the database, then realized I should come
up with the database structure before I went too far with it.  So currently
I have a lot of the info in a mysql database, but still haven't gotten
around to making a nice view for it.  

Okay, I've gotta get back to work, but wanted to get some updates out on
this stuff.  

--Josh

> Funny you should mention this one too...I'm currently working on this as a
> tool. :)
>
>
>
> Again, awesome!  I'd love to take a look at what you've done with that so
> far, do you have a link I can visit?
>

I've gone back and forth in my mind with how I want to implement this: a
wiki or a database.  There are advantages to both.  As a wiki, we can show
Card of the Day articles that are for that card, as well as strategy tips,
decks built around the card, and lots of other things like that.  As a
database, it's easy to integrate into the forums on councilofelrond.org and
meccg.net (which was my original goal).  Here are the two sites I'm modeling
it after:

http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/
http://www.swccgpc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://cards.swccgpc.com/

The second site, the Star Wars CCG (decipher game) Player's Committee site,
has both a database and a wiki, which is cool.

I had started working on code for the database, then realized I should come
up with the database structure before I went too far with it.  So currently
I have a lot of the info in a mysql database, but still haven't gotten
around to making a nice view for it.

Okay, I've gotta get back to work, but wanted to get some updates out on
this stuff.

--Josh

Okay, sorry I haven't responded to this sooner...work's been busy lately.
See my replies below:

On 7/31/07, Ris Misner <rm...@ne...> wrote:
>
>  Hi Josh H,
>
>
>
> Thanks for setting this up!  I browsed over to the new site today and
> registered there so I could take a look around.  I like the look of it ve=
ry
> much but I have a couple of questions/concerns/change requests=85
>

No problem! That was the plan...get it up so we can critique it and figure
out what we want to change.

First, since you mentioned running into problems with your permissions on
> sourceforge, I enabled you as a project admin, so you should have full
> priveleges now.  I don't mind continuing to host your new site at
> ardanet.hunholz.com or back on sourceforge, the host location makes littl=
e
> difference to me.  But I wanted to make sure you won't run into more
> restrictions on sourceforge for any reason, just to keep things moving
> smoothly.  The sourceforge user permission management is limiting, not
> offering any "web developer" role, and didn't offer me any way to increas=
e
> your permission level for web development purposes only, so I just checke=
d
> the project admin box which should give you access to everything.
>
I don't think the issues were that my user didn't have permissions on
sourceforge, but rather how they have their web server set up.  I talked
with a few other people who have hosted with sourceforge, and they all say
sourceforge is pretty strict on what the apache user can access, etc.  The
issue was once I got the site up there, apache/phpBB wanted some tools and
access to some files that their server didn't want to give it.  I messed
with it for a while, and even tried to do the install on my server and then
move the site over.  But then it was complaining that it couldn't get the
right path to the tools.  As long as everyone is fine with it being hosted
on my server, I'm content to leave it there.

> Is it still in your plans to add Bugzilla to the site?  We don't need a
> serious bug tracker very soon, but I'd like to eventually get one up and
> running rather than use a less organized forum in order to track the
> revision history of a bug, link duplicates together, assign
> responsibilities, mark them as closed, etc.  We can do all that "by hand"
> with a Bugs forum like you set up, but I think Bugzilla would be more
> powerful.  Would it still be possible to set that up at some point?  (I
> don't actually have much experience with Bugzilla and I'm always open to
> opposing opinions)
>
Yes, I do plan to add Bugzilla some time soon.  I hadn't added it before
because sourceforge doesn't seem to place nice with it, as all its files ar=
e
.cgi (perl code) and not php.  I may not have been putting them in the righ=
t
spot either, but I couldn't seem to get it working, so I didn't set it up.
Now that I'm hosting on my server, I can easily add this.

On the new portal ( http://ardanet.hunholz.com/bb3portal.php ) I would like
> to add links to some more useful pages
>
> -          the "Project Summary Page for Developers"
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/
>
> -          the Ardanet wiki on sourceforge
> http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/
>
> -          the mailing list info and archives
> http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=3D192968
>
I'll get these added soon.

> What about the "tasks" area on sourceforge?
> http://sourceforge.net/pm/?group_id=3D192968  The idea for this area is t=
o
> keep track of who is doing what for the project, how far along they are, =
and
> when they think they'll be done.  As the project leader, I find it import=
ant
> to have something like this, especially given the "on again / off again"
> nature of projects like this where each of us may be likely to take break=
s
> from it for weeks at a time now and then (such as I did recently leading =
up
> to Worlds this past weekend).  Do you guys like this feature?  Would you
> ever use it?  Should we use the one that comes with Sourceforge, or use
> something else?  Or just report on our progress to the mailing list and
> leave it at that?  I want you guys to have access to update that kind of
> info yourselves, but I assume that as the project leader, I will do most =
of
> the maintenance on keeping the info updated.  Do you think it's useful to
> put a link to it on the portal ( http://ardanet.hunholz.com/bb3portal.php=
) ?  Or should we leave it as-is so that you have to go through the project
> summary page to get there (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/) ?  O=
r
> should I just disable/hide it?
>

I like sourceforge's  task area, so I'm happy with leaving it as that and
linking the portal back to sourceforge for that.  Since you're the leader,
it's really whatever you're most comfortable with anyway. :)

Along those lines, I also intend to keep track of a "project roadmap
> document" in the wiki, which will show up here:
> http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/Project+Roadmap.  When I get around t=
o
> writing it up (probably later today, definitely by the end of the week) t=
he
> project roadmap will list the upcoming project goals similar to how I hav=
e
> announced them in the News area in the past, but looking farther into the
> future (and all of the planned features listed in the roadmap will link t=
o
> other wiki pages describing those features' design and implementation
> details)  I'll keep the roadmap updated as we meet the various goals to s=
how
> what has been done and what remains.
>
>
>
> Does the project roadmap make a separate "tasks" area unnecessary, or is
> it still useful to separately track task assignments, who is working on
> what, how far along they are, and when they expect to complete?  Or shoul=
d
> we just write that added info into the wiki pages?  Or is this kind of
> formal tracking of task assignments and progress too much unnecessary has=
sle
> for such a small team to bother with?
>
I think having a separate tasks area is good, for assigning different tasks
to different people.  The project roadmap is more of a way to have a "big
picture" view of how things are going, where the tasks give assignments
("small pictures") to the team members.  That's how I view it at least.

> Does the new forum support avatar images and more detailed profiles so we
> could define our roles in our profiles?  It's unnecessary fluff I admit, =
but
> if it's only a simple a matter of turning on a switch, then I would vote =
do
> it.  But if it would take any significant work, then I would say don't
> bother.
>

Yep, avatars are supported. I'm not sure if I enabled them or not.  If I
didn't, I will flip the switch later this week to turn them on.

On the project summary page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/) we
> have a link in a drop-down menu to Project > Web Site, which currently li=
nks
> to http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/  I thought I saw something in the
> project admin settings where you can redirect this link, so I'm looking f=
or
> it, and will redirect it to http://ardanet.hunholz.com/ if/when I find
> that option again.  However, I gave away some of our cards at Worlds with
> the http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/ address on them, so I want to make
> sure that address continues to work, if even as an auto-redirect to
> ardanet.hunholz.com.
>

Yeah, my thoughts exactly.  I think we should always use
ardanet.sourceforge.net as a static link to wherever it's hosted.  That way
we have a constant that doesn't change, if the web space ever does.

That's all the comments I have on the website for now.  GREAT JOB and thank=
s
> again for setting it up in time for Worlds.  I will follow up with a
> separate note about my experience at Worlds 2007 this past weekend.
>
>
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Ris
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> *From:* ard...@li... [mailto:
> ard...@li...] *On Behalf Of *Josh
> Hunholz
> *Sent:* Friday, July 27, 2007 12:50 PM
> *To:* Developer discussion
> *Subject:* [Ardanet-developers] website update
>
>
>
> Team,
>
> After much fiddling around with the SourceForge webspace, and having
> little success for a few reasons (some permissions issues, as well as the=
ir
> having older version of key tools like PHP), I set the site up on my web
> server and put a link on the ardanet.sourceforge.net site.  I have no
> problem hosting the site there, as long as it's okay with the rest of you
> guys.  In fact, we could register ardanet.com/org/net (whichever you
> prefer) and point it to the server.  For now, you an access it either by
> going to ardanet.sourceforge.net and following the link, or by going to
> ardanet.hunholz.com directly.
>
> As far as the software, I'm using PHPbb3 with the "Portal mod" that gives
> the main page more of a website feel and lets us have a lot of control in
> customizing it.  My original thought was to make a site, and then just
> integrate the forum and a bug tracker, but I think this works for us just=
 as
> well.  I've also put in the comments from the posts on the Sourceforge
> boards, so it has the same info.
>
> The admin account on the forums is username admin and password (same as
> password Ris sent me for Mysql on Sourceforge. I won't put it in this not=
e
> since it can be accessed publicly.  Send me a note if you need it and I'l=
l
> reply with it).  If we all create accounts on the site, we can all have
> admin access and that will list us as "team members".
>
> Okay, my lunch is over so I'm back to work, but wanted to get this info
> out to the list as soon as I could.
>
> --Josh <><
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc.
> Still grepping through log files to find problems?  Stop.
> Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser.
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> _______________________________________________
> Ardanet-developers mailing list
> Ard...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ardanet-developers
>
>

Yep, I beat you to it and found it last night.  :P

I installed it and created a deck.

General impressions: All in all, I actually had a good opinion of it.  It's
either improved a little bit in the past 2-3 years, or I figured things out
that I didn't know 2-3 years ago.  I found it slightly easier to use than I
remembered.  However, it's still cumbersome in some ways, and it doesn't
satisfy my enough to give up on Ardanet. :)

Finding and downloading it: easy, no complaints

Installation: I was annoyed that I couldn't find an obviously-named
"setup.exe" and had to return to the website to read the instructions to
find out I had to open a command window and execute "install game.bat"
Otherwise it was pretty smooth.

Setup: I didn't have any problem logging into the server or creating a
username, or figuring out how to start making a deck.  However, I couldn't
figure out how to import any premade decks in order to play a game right
away, so I had to spend all night making a new deck and exploring the
deck-building features instead of playing. 

Deck Building: I had fun making an interesting deck that I'm looking forward
to playing.  The deck building interface was better than I remembered, and
the way it lets you sort the cards is not bad.  I still wished I could do a
search - some kind of search engine is such an obvious feature for software
like this - and I thought that it should name the categories a little
differently so that "Allies - Diplomats" would appear next to "Allies -
Sage" . The way GCCG sorts "Diplomat Ally" and "Sage Ally" the allies are
spread all over, and same with factions.  But it was still quite useful to
sort the cards this way and that made it easier and more fun to make my deck
than I had been dreading from my memories of using GCCG in the distant past.
There was definitely a learning curve involved, and I wished I had
drag-and-drop and many other features in the GUI, but I was able to learn it
well enough to feel comfortable with it for the most part in about an hour,
which really isn't too bad - it took me much longer to figure out Adobe
Photoshop LOL.  Anyway, while playing with the GCCG deck building tools, I
could see how they defined their data, which seems pretty good.  I want to
look into parsing their XML file to make the CardDatabase.CPP file I've been
working on.

That's all for now until I get a chance to play a game.

-- Ris

  _____  

From: ard...@li...
[mailto:ard...@li...] On Behalf Of Josh
Hunholz
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 9:17 AM
To: Developer discussion
Subject: Re: [Ardanet-developers] website update

GCCG is at http://gccg.sourceforge.net/

On 8/2/07, Ris Misner <rm...@ne...  <mailto:rm...@ne...> >
wrote:

Continuing the brainstorming, here are some more suggestions for more links
to put on the new website.  Seems like these links could all be very useful
to have around for reference for obvious reasons, other than in my
bookmarks.

- Meccg.net

- The GCCG site (and any special MECCG link for GCCG. I'm looking for these
links now in order to download the latest version)

- The NetMECCG page hosted on meccg.net

-- Ris

  _____  

From: ard...@li...
[mailto:ard...@li...] On Behalf Of Ris
Misner
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 1:02 PM
To: 'Developer discussion'
Subject: Re: [Ardanet-developers] website update

Hi Josh H,

Thanks for setting this up!  I browsed over to the new site today and
registered there so I could take a look around.  I like the look of it very
much but I have a couple of questions/concerns/change requests.

First, since you mentioned running into problems with your permissions on
sourceforge, I enabled you as a project admin, so you should have full
priveleges now.  I don't mind continuing to host your new site at
ardanet.hunholz.com or back on sourceforge, the host location makes little
difference to me.  But I wanted to make sure you won't run into more
restrictions on sourceforge for any reason, just to keep things moving
smoothly.  The sourceforge user permission management is limiting, not
offering any "web developer" role, and didn't offer me any way to increase
your permission level for web development purposes only, so I just checked
the project admin box which should give you access to everything.

Is it still in your plans to add Bugzilla to the site?  We don't need a
serious bug tracker very soon, but I'd like to eventually get one up and
running rather than use a less organized forum in order to track the
revision history of a bug, link duplicates together, assign
responsibilities, mark them as closed, etc.  We can do all that "by hand"
with a Bugs forum like you set up, but I think Bugzilla would be more
powerful.  Would it still be possible to set that up at some point?  (I
don't actually have much experience with Bugzilla and I'm always open to
opposing opinions)

On the new portal ( http://ardanet.hunholz.com/bb3portal.php ) I would like
to add links to some more useful pages

-          the "Project Summary Page for Developers"
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/

-          the Ardanet wiki on sourceforge
http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/

-          the mailing list info and archives
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=192968

What about the "tasks" area on sourceforge?
http://sourceforge.net/pm/?group_id=192968  The idea for this area is to
keep track of who is doing what for the project, how far along they are, and
when they think they'll be done.  As the project leader, I find it important
to have something like this, especially given the "on again / off again"
nature of projects like this where each of us may be likely to take breaks
from it for weeks at a time now and then (such as I did recently leading up
to Worlds this past weekend).  Do you guys like this feature?  Would you
ever use it?  Should we use the one that comes with Sourceforge, or use
something else?  Or just report on our progress to the mailing list and
leave it at that?  I want you guys to have access to update that kind of
info yourselves, but I assume that as the project leader, I will do most of
the maintenance on keeping the info updated.  Do you think it's useful to
put a link to it on the portal ( http://ardanet.hunholz.com/bb3portal.php )
?  Or should we leave it as-is so that you have to go through the project
summary page to get there (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/) ?  Or
should I just disable/hide it?

Along those lines, I also intend to keep track of a "project roadmap
document" in the wiki, which will show up here:
http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/Project+Roadmap.  When I get around to
writing it up (probably later today, definitely by the end of the week) the
project roadmap will list the upcoming project goals similar to how I have
announced them in the News area in the past, but looking farther into the
future (and all of the planned features listed in the roadmap will link to
other wiki pages describing those features' design and implementation
details)  I'll keep the roadmap updated as we meet the various goals to show
what has been done and what remains.

Does the project roadmap make a separate "tasks" area unnecessary, or is it
still useful to separately track task assignments, who is working on what,
how far along they are, and when they expect to complete?  Or should we just
write that added info into the wiki pages?  Or is this kind of formal
tracking of task assignments and progress too much unnecessary hassle for
such a small team to bother with?

Does the new forum support avatar images and more detailed profiles so we
could define our roles in our profiles?  It's unnecessary fluff I admit, but
if it's only a simple a matter of turning on a switch, then I would vote do
it.  But if it would take any significant work, then I would say don't
bother.

On the project summary page ( <http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/>
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/) we have a link in a drop-down menu
to Project > Web Site, which currently links to
http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/  I thought I saw something in the project
admin settings where you can redirect this link, so I'm looking for it, and
will redirect it to http://ardanet.hunholz.com/ if/when I find that option
again.  However, I gave away some of our cards at Worlds with the
http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/ address on them, so I want to make sure that
address continues to work, if even as an auto-redirect to
ardanet.hunholz.com.

That's all the comments I have on the website for now.  GREAT JOB and thanks
again for setting it up in time for Worlds.  I will follow up with a
separate note about my experience at Worlds 2007 this past weekend.

Best Regards,

Ris

  _____  

From: ard...@li...
[mailto:ard...@li...] On Behalf Of Josh
Hunholz
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 12:50 PM
To: Developer discussion
Subject: [Ardanet-developers] website update

Team,

After much fiddling around with the SourceForge webspace, and having little
success for a few reasons (some permissions issues, as well as their having
older version of key tools like PHP), I set the site up on my web server and
put a link on the ardanet.sourceforge.net site.  I have no problem hosting
the site there, as long as it's okay with the rest of you guys.  In fact, we
could register ardanet.com/org/net (whichever you prefer) and point it to
the server.  For now, you an access it either by going to
ardanet.sourceforge.net and following the link, or by going to
ardanet.hunholz.com directly.

As far as the software, I'm using PHPbb3 with the "Portal mod" that gives
the main page more of a website feel and lets us have a lot of control in
customizing it.  My original thought was to make a site, and then just
integrate the forum and a bug tracker, but I think this works for us just as
well.  I've also put in the comments from the posts on the Sourceforge
boards, so it has the same info. 

The admin account on the forums is username admin and password (same as
password Ris sent me for Mysql on Sourceforge. I won't put it in this note
since it can be accessed publicly.  Send me a note if you need it and I'll
reply with it).  If we all create accounts on the site, we can all have
admin access and that will list us as "team members".  

Okay, my lunch is over so I'm back to work, but wanted to get this info out
to the list as soon as I could.

--Josh <><

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_______________________________________________ 
Ardanet-developers mailing list
Ard...@li...
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ardanet-developers

Check out the wiki at http://www.councilofelrond.org/wiki. 

OMG that is sweet!  Thanks so much for that link.  I've been looking for
something like this for quite a while.  (long enough that I decided to do it
myself.)

Funny you should mention this one too...I'm currently working on this as a
tool. :)

Again, awesome!  I'd love to take a look at what you've done with that so
far, do you have a link I can visit?

On another note, I created one page for a feature of Ardanet, covering our
ideas for Shadow Cards.  http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/shadow+cards
I'm planning to use this page as a template for other pages for other
features, so please let me know if you think there are any sections missing
that I should add.  This is pretty much both the developer's reference
material and the user's guide.  Any examples we create can be test cases for
debugging.

-- Ris

  _____  

From: ard...@li...
[mailto:ard...@li...] On Behalf Of Josh
Hunholz
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 9:29 AM
To: Developer discussion
Subject: Re: [Ardanet-developers] Project Roadmap

My next task will be to undertake converting all of the MECCG rules
documents into Wiki form.  One of my goals in that effort is to assemble all
of the rules for the same part of game play which may be described in the
METW rules, then ammended in Dragons, and ammended again in MELE, etc, so
that for example we would have one page of the Wiki for Corruption Checks,
showing the original METW starter rules, how it is modified for the standard
rules, how it was ammended in Dragons and each expansion, and then any
published CRFs, and following that, any documented examples or
clarifications for how 2 or more cards work out in a tricky way in published
tournament rulings, etc, so that when it comes to implement version 3 (or
even when I'm playing casual games) it will be much easier to quickly search
for the details of a particular rule and find the complete set of those
rules without having to search 7 different rulebooks independantly.

Check out the wiki at http://www.councilofelrond.org/wiki.  We've been
working on that rules wiki for almost a year now and it's looking pretty
good.  I've done a lot of editing on it to wikify the existing rules docs,
so most of them look decent.  The goal of that wiki is to convert all the
existing rules docs into 1 single official rules document. 

As a future effort - not something I will do any time soon - I would also
like to enhance the wiki to add a page for every card in the game, to show
the errata, any clarifications for how the card is played, and any special
rulings for that card as combined with other cards.  This will be part of
the version 4.0 effort to implement all of the special card rules (the text
on each card) as functions in Ardanet so that it knows how all the cards are
played - we'll need this kind of reference material on the cards to help us
implement those functions, as well as document to Ardanet users how we
implemented each card in Ardanet once we are enforcing the rules to that
degree.  But of course that's a long ways away.

Funny you should mention this one too...I'm currently working on this as a
tool. :)  This just gives me another reason to do more work on it. 

--Josh

> My next task will be to undertake converting all of the MECCG rules
> documents into Wiki form.  One of my goals in that effort is to assemble =
all
> of the rules for the same part of game play which may be described in the
> METW rules, then ammended in Dragons, and ammended again in MELE, etc, so
> that for example we would have one page of the Wiki for Corruption Checks=
,
> showing the original METW starter rules, how it is modified for the stand=
ard
> rules, how it was ammended in Dragons and each expansion, and then any
> published CRFs, and following that, any documented examples or
> clarifications for how 2 or more cards work out in a tricky way in publis=
hed
> tournament rulings, etc, so that when it comes to implement version 3 (or
> even when I'm playing casual games) it will be much easier to quickly sea=
rch
> for the details of a particular rule and find the complete set of those
> rules without having to search 7 different rulebooks independantly.
>

Check out the wiki at http://www.councilofelrond.org/wiki.  We've been
working on that rules wiki for almost a year now and it's looking pretty
good.  I've done a lot of editing on it to wikify the existing rules docs,
so most of them look decent.  The goal of that wiki is to convert all the
existing rules docs into 1 single official rules document.

As a future effort =96 not something I will do any time soon =96 I would al=
so
> like to enhance the wiki to add a page for every card in the game, to sho=
w
> the errata, any clarifications for how the card is played, and any specia=
l
> rulings for that card as combined with other cards.  This will be part of
> the version 4.0 effort to implement all of the special card rules (the
> text on each card) as functions in Ardanet so that it knows how all the
> cards are played =96 we'll need this kind of reference material on the ca=
rds
> to help us implement those functions, as well as document to Ardanet user=
s
> how we implemented each card in Ardanet once we are enforcing the rules t=
o
> that degree.  But of course that's a long ways away.
>

Funny you should mention this one too...I'm currently working on this as a
tool. :)  This just gives me another reason to do more work on it.

--Josh

GCCG is at http://gccg.sourceforge.net/

On 8/2/07, Ris Misner <rm...@ne...> wrote:
>
>  Continuing the brainstorming, here are some more suggestions for more
> links to put on the new website.  Seems like these links could all be ver=
y
> useful to have around for reference for obvious reasons, other than in my
> bookmarks=85
>
>
>
> - Meccg.net
>
> - The GCCG site (and any special MECCG link for GCCG=85 I'm looking for
> these links now in order to download the latest version)
>
> - The NetMECCG page hosted on meccg.net
>
>
>
> -- Ris
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> *From:* ard...@li... [mailto:
> ard...@li...] *On Behalf Of *Ris
> Misner
> *Sent:* Tuesday, July 31, 2007 1:02 PM
> *To:* 'Developer discussion'
> *Subject:* Re: [Ardanet-developers] website update
>
>
>
> Hi Josh H,
>
>
>
> Thanks for setting this up!  I browsed over to the new site today and
> registered there so I could take a look around.  I like the look of it ve=
ry
> much but I have a couple of questions/concerns/change requests=85
>
>
>
> First, since you mentioned running into problems with your permissions on
> sourceforge, I enabled you as a project admin, so you should have full
> priveleges now.  I don't mind continuing to host your new site at
> ardanet.hunholz.com or back on sourceforge, the host location makes littl=
e
> difference to me.  But I wanted to make sure you won't run into more
> restrictions on sourceforge for any reason, just to keep things moving
> smoothly.  The sourceforge user permission management is limiting, not
> offering any "web developer" role, and didn't offer me any way to increas=
e
> your permission level for web development purposes only, so I just checke=
d
> the project admin box which should give you access to everything.
>
>
>
> Is it still in your plans to add Bugzilla to the site?  We don't need a
> serious bug tracker very soon, but I'd like to eventually get one up and
> running rather than use a less organized forum in order to track the
> revision history of a bug, link duplicates together, assign
> responsibilities, mark them as closed, etc.  We can do all that "by hand"
> with a Bugs forum like you set up, but I think Bugzilla would be more
> powerful.  Would it still be possible to set that up at some point?  (I
> don't actually have much experience with Bugzilla and I'm always open to
> opposing opinions)
>
>
>
> On the new portal ( http://ardanet.hunholz.com/bb3portal.php ) I would
> like to add links to some more useful pages
>
> -          the "Project Summary Page for Developers"
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/
>
> -          the Ardanet wiki on sourceforge
> http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/
>
> -          the mailing list info and archives
> http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=3D192968
>
>
>
> What about the "tasks" area on sourceforge?
> http://sourceforge.net/pm/?group_id=3D192968  The idea for this area is t=
o
> keep track of who is doing what for the project, how far along they are, =
and
> when they think they'll be done.  As the project leader, I find it import=
ant
> to have something like this, especially given the "on again / off again"
> nature of projects like this where each of us may be likely to take break=
s
> from it for weeks at a time now and then (such as I did recently leading =
up
> to Worlds this past weekend).  Do you guys like this feature?  Would you
> ever use it?  Should we use the one that comes with Sourceforge, or use
> something else?  Or just report on our progress to the mailing list and
> leave it at that?  I want you guys to have access to update that kind of
> info yourselves, but I assume that as the project leader, I will do most =
of
> the maintenance on keeping the info updated.  Do you think it's useful to
> put a link to it on the portal ( http://ardanet.hunholz.com/bb3portal.php=
) ?  Or should we leave it as-is so that you have to go through the project
> summary page to get there (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/) ?  O=
r
> should I just disable/hide it?
>
>
>
> Along those lines, I also intend to keep track of a "project roadmap
> document" in the wiki, which will show up here:
> http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/Project+Roadmap.  When I get around t=
o
> writing it up (probably later today, definitely by the end of the week) t=
he
> project roadmap will list the upcoming project goals similar to how I hav=
e
> announced them in the News area in the past, but looking farther into the
> future (and all of the planned features listed in the roadmap will link t=
o
> other wiki pages describing those features' design and implementation
> details)  I'll keep the roadmap updated as we meet the various goals to s=
how
> what has been done and what remains.
>
>
>
> Does the project roadmap make a separate "tasks" area unnecessary, or is
> it still useful to separately track task assignments, who is working on
> what, how far along they are, and when they expect to complete?  Or shoul=
d
> we just write that added info into the wiki pages?  Or is this kind of
> formal tracking of task assignments and progress too much unnecessary has=
sle
> for such a small team to bother with?
>
>
>
> Does the new forum support avatar images and more detailed profiles so we
> could define our roles in our profiles?  It's unnecessary fluff I admit, =
but
> if it's only a simple a matter of turning on a switch, then I would vote =
do
> it.  But if it would take any significant work, then I would say don't
> bother.
>
>
>
> On the project summary page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/) we
> have a link in a drop-down menu to Project > Web Site, which currently li=
nks
> to http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/  I thought I saw something in the
> project admin settings where you can redirect this link, so I'm looking f=
or
> it, and will redirect it to http://ardanet.hunholz.com/ if/when I find
> that option again.  However, I gave away some of our cards at Worlds with
> the http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/ address on them, so I want to make
> sure that address continues to work, if even as an auto-redirect to
> ardanet.hunholz.com.
>
>
>
> That's all the comments I have on the website for now.  GREAT JOB and
> thanks again for setting it up in time for Worlds.  I will follow up with=
 a
> separate note about my experience at Worlds 2007 this past weekend.
>
>
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Ris
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> *From:* ard...@li... [mailto:
> ard...@li...] *On Behalf Of *Josh
> Hunholz
> *Sent:* Friday, July 27, 2007 12:50 PM
> *To:* Developer discussion
> *Subject:* [Ardanet-developers] website update
>
>
>
> Team,
>
> After much fiddling around with the SourceForge webspace, and having
> little success for a few reasons (some permissions issues, as well as the=
ir
> having older version of key tools like PHP), I set the site up on my web
> server and put a link on the ardanet.sourceforge.net site.  I have no
> problem hosting the site there, as long as it's okay with the rest of you
> guys.  In fact, we could register ardanet.com/org/net (whichever you
> prefer) and point it to the server.  For now, you an access it either by
> going to ardanet.sourceforge.net and following the link, or by going to
> ardanet.hunholz.com directly.
>
> As far as the software, I'm using PHPbb3 with the "Portal mod" that gives
> the main page more of a website feel and lets us have a lot of control in
> customizing it.  My original thought was to make a site, and then just
> integrate the forum and a bug tracker, but I think this works for us just=
 as
> well.  I've also put in the comments from the posts on the Sourceforge
> boards, so it has the same info.
>
> The admin account on the forums is username admin and password (same as
> password Ris sent me for Mysql on Sourceforge. I won't put it in this not=
e
> since it can be accessed publicly.  Send me a note if you need it and I'l=
l
> reply with it).  If we all create accounts on the site, we can all have
> admin access and that will list us as "team members".
>
> Okay, my lunch is over so I'm back to work, but wanted to get this info
> out to the list as soon as I could.
>
> --Josh <><
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc.
> Still grepping through log files to find problems?  Stop.
> Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser.
> Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >>  http://get.splunk.com/
> _______________________________________________
> Ardanet-developers mailing list
> Ard...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ardanet-developers
>
>

Continuing the brainstorming, here are some more suggestions for more links
to put on the new website.  Seems like these links could all be very useful
to have around for reference for obvious reasons, other than in my
bookmarks.

- Meccg.net

- The GCCG site (and any special MECCG link for GCCG. I'm looking for these
links now in order to download the latest version)

- The NetMECCG page hosted on meccg.net

-- Ris

  _____  

From: ard...@li...
[mailto:ard...@li...] On Behalf Of Ris
Misner
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 1:02 PM
To: 'Developer discussion'
Subject: Re: [Ardanet-developers] website update

Hi Josh H,

Thanks for setting this up!  I browsed over to the new site today and
registered there so I could take a look around.  I like the look of it very
much but I have a couple of questions/concerns/change requests.

First, since you mentioned running into problems with your permissions on
sourceforge, I enabled you as a project admin, so you should have full
priveleges now.  I don't mind continuing to host your new site at
ardanet.hunholz.com or back on sourceforge, the host location makes little
difference to me.  But I wanted to make sure you won't run into more
restrictions on sourceforge for any reason, just to keep things moving
smoothly.  The sourceforge user permission management is limiting, not
offering any "web developer" role, and didn't offer me any way to increase
your permission level for web development purposes only, so I just checked
the project admin box which should give you access to everything.

Is it still in your plans to add Bugzilla to the site?  We don't need a
serious bug tracker very soon, but I'd like to eventually get one up and
running rather than use a less organized forum in order to track the
revision history of a bug, link duplicates together, assign
responsibilities, mark them as closed, etc.  We can do all that "by hand"
with a Bugs forum like you set up, but I think Bugzilla would be more
powerful.  Would it still be possible to set that up at some point?  (I
don't actually have much experience with Bugzilla and I'm always open to
opposing opinions)

On the new portal ( http://ardanet.hunholz.com/bb3portal.php ) I would like
to add links to some more useful pages

-          the "Project Summary Page for Developers"
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/

-          the Ardanet wiki on sourceforge
http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/

-          the mailing list info and archives
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=192968

What about the "tasks" area on sourceforge?
http://sourceforge.net/pm/?group_id=192968  The idea for this area is to
keep track of who is doing what for the project, how far along they are, and
when they think they'll be done.  As the project leader, I find it important
to have something like this, especially given the "on again / off again"
nature of projects like this where each of us may be likely to take breaks
from it for weeks at a time now and then (such as I did recently leading up
to Worlds this past weekend).  Do you guys like this feature?  Would you
ever use it?  Should we use the one that comes with Sourceforge, or use
something else?  Or just report on our progress to the mailing list and
leave it at that?  I want you guys to have access to update that kind of
info yourselves, but I assume that as the project leader, I will do most of
the maintenance on keeping the info updated.  Do you think it's useful to
put a link to it on the portal ( http://ardanet.hunholz.com/bb3portal.php )
?  Or should we leave it as-is so that you have to go through the project
summary page to get there (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/) ?  Or
should I just disable/hide it?

Along those lines, I also intend to keep track of a "project roadmap
document" in the wiki, which will show up here:
http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/Project+Roadmap.  When I get around to
writing it up (probably later today, definitely by the end of the week) the
project roadmap will list the upcoming project goals similar to how I have
announced them in the News area in the past, but looking farther into the
future (and all of the planned features listed in the roadmap will link to
other wiki pages describing those features' design and implementation
details)  I'll keep the roadmap updated as we meet the various goals to show
what has been done and what remains.

Does the project roadmap make a separate "tasks" area unnecessary, or is it
still useful to separately track task assignments, who is working on what,
how far along they are, and when they expect to complete?  Or should we just
write that added info into the wiki pages?  Or is this kind of formal
tracking of task assignments and progress too much unnecessary hassle for
such a small team to bother with?

Does the new forum support avatar images and more detailed profiles so we
could define our roles in our profiles?  It's unnecessary fluff I admit, but
if it's only a simple a matter of turning on a switch, then I would vote do
it.  But if it would take any significant work, then I would say don't
bother.

On the project summary page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/) we
have a link in a drop-down menu to Project > Web Site, which currently links
to http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/  I thought I saw something in the project
admin settings where you can redirect this link, so I'm looking for it, and
will redirect it to http://ardanet.hunholz.com/ if/when I find that option
again.  However, I gave away some of our cards at Worlds with the
http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/ address on them, so I want to make sure that
address continues to work, if even as an auto-redirect to
ardanet.hunholz.com.

That's all the comments I have on the website for now.  GREAT JOB and thanks
again for setting it up in time for Worlds.  I will follow up with a
separate note about my experience at Worlds 2007 this past weekend.

Best Regards,

Ris

  _____  

From: ard...@li...
[mailto:ard...@li...] On Behalf Of Josh
Hunholz
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 12:50 PM
To: Developer discussion
Subject: [Ardanet-developers] website update

Team,

After much fiddling around with the SourceForge webspace, and having little
success for a few reasons (some permissions issues, as well as their having
older version of key tools like PHP), I set the site up on my web server and
put a link on the ardanet.sourceforge.net site.  I have no problem hosting
the site there, as long as it's okay with the rest of you guys.  In fact, we
could register ardanet.com/org/net (whichever you prefer) and point it to
the server.  For now, you an access it either by going to
ardanet.sourceforge.net and following the link, or by going to
ardanet.hunholz.com directly.

As far as the software, I'm using PHPbb3 with the "Portal mod" that gives
the main page more of a website feel and lets us have a lot of control in
customizing it.  My original thought was to make a site, and then just
integrate the forum and a bug tracker, but I think this works for us just as
well.  I've also put in the comments from the posts on the Sourceforge
boards, so it has the same info. 

The admin account on the forums is username admin and password (same as
password Ris sent me for Mysql on Sourceforge. I won't put it in this note
since it can be accessed publicly.  Send me a note if you need it and I'll
reply with it).  If we all create accounts on the site, we can all have
admin access and that will list us as "team members".  

Okay, my lunch is over so I'm back to work, but wanted to get this info out
to the list as soon as I could.

--Josh <><

Hi Team,

The first draft of the project roadmap is up on the Wiki:
http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/Project+Roadmap

It needs more detail because there are a ton of features we have in mind
which are not listed.  All of our feature plans need to be assigned a target
version and integrated into the roadmap, but what I've written up should
keep us going for a while.  For example, it didn't seem worth taking the
time today to identify every window that we need to create and choose the
order in which to make those.  I want to get farther along before we make
those decisions.

Both of you guys should have permission to edit the wiki, including the
roadmap.  Feel free but not obligated.

My next task will be to undertake converting all of the MECCG rules
documents into Wiki form.  One of my goals in that effort is to assemble all
of the rules for the same part of game play which may be described in the
METW rules, then ammended in Dragons, and ammended again in MELE, etc, so
that for example we would have one page of the Wiki for Corruption Checks,
showing the original METW starter rules, how it is modified for the standard
rules, how it was ammended in Dragons and each expansion, and then any
published CRFs, and following that, any documented examples or
clarifications for how 2 or more cards work out in a tricky way in published
tournament rulings, etc, so that when it comes to implement version 3 (or
even when I'm playing casual games) it will be much easier to quickly search
for the details of a particular rule and find the complete set of those
rules without having to search 7 different rulebooks independantly.

As a future effort - not something I will do any time soon - I would also
like to enhance the wiki to add a page for every card in the game, to show
the errata, any clarifications for how the card is played, and any special
rulings for that card as combined with other cards.  This will be part of
the version 4.0 effort to implement all of the special card rules (the text
on each card) as functions in Ardanet so that it knows how all the cards are
played - we'll need this kind of reference material on the cards to help us
implement those functions, as well as document to Ardanet users how we
implemented each card in Ardanet once we are enforcing the rules to that
degree.  But of course that's a long ways away.

Please let me know if you have any recommended changes to the roadmap, if
you think I have targetted too much or too little per version, etc.  This is
also meant to be a fluid document, so if you decide you want to start
working on something that is targetted for a version later down the pipe,
then by all means, dive in and go for it, and we'll ammend the roadmap to
show it as a current task.

-- Ris

Hi Team,

I'm home from MECCG Worlds 2007.  I told everyone there about Ardanet, and
though I only managed to pass off a couple of the "not-in-business" cards, I
left a stack of them lying around and a few more may have been picked up.

One person I met said he was a programmer with lots of spare time on his
hands, and to meet one such person was the best I could have expected.  He
took a card and hopefully he will visit the website and contact us.
Unfortunately, having met 20 people that day, all in the span of an hour, I
can't remember his name, but might recognize it from the email list.  I
couldn't tell if I had recruited him completely, but I have hope that he
will show up.

I was surprised to find that everyone I talked to seemed thoroughly
satisfied with GCCG, and it was more difficult than I expected to sell
people on the idea that it's worth having something better like Ardanet and
why.  Of course now in hindsight I have thought of better things I could
have said to sell people on it, but oh well.  A common response I got was
"Well, have you tried GCCG?" and in the discussions that followed, I tended
to suggest some of our feature ideas, which would follow into "well I can do
that in GCCG by doing X, Y, and Z" and I learned about some features of GCCG
that I was unaware of which must have been added since the last time I used
it a couple of years ago.  So I intend to download the latest version and
try it again for research purposes.  However, these discussions of Ardanet
vs. GCCG tended to get cut short before I could hit on one of our ideas that
made the person say "oh yeah now that would be sweet!" which was somewhat
disappointing.

However, though I was unable to really sell many people on how wonderful
Ardanet is going to be, watching all the games reinforced my opinion of how
badly Ardanet is needed.  One thing stands out in my mind: even the most
expert players of MECCG and even the World Champion winner must spend a good
deal of every game debating the rules and the playability of cards.  I have
thought for a long time that this game is so complex that a computer would
be invaluable to improving the pace of the game by settling these debates
before they occur, and though the full extent of those features is farther
down the road for Ardanet, watching the world champion debate the rules made
me more confident that Ardanet will be a boon to the MECCG community (though
we may have to make it to version 3.0 to prove it LOL)

Along those lines, searching the cards and tallying the bonuses and the
score is also a struggle for even the most expert player, and again, points
to a computer to assist these efforts.  Where I thought I needed a computer
to help me play my "Indiana Jones" decks with a monolothic hero company of
3-6 characters, the final 4 in the world finals were all playing minion,
balrog, or fallen wizard decks with numeruos small-mind companies, upwards
of 5 or even 6 companies, and more cards in play than I had ever seen in one
game where even a large table seemed too small.  I also played some 2v2
games where I found checking for uniqueness was more difficult because of
the number of cards in play.  All this goes to show how helpful it will be
to have a computer search the cards in play for applicable bonuses (when the
rules knowledge and card details are programmed in eventually).

To drive the point home further, there was a running gag we shared at Worlds
this past weekend which sprung out of this constant problem with MECCG that
the cards can be unintuitively worded sometimes, and/or the rules can
sometimes play out in strange ways. sometimes in a way that catches you by
surprise and is disappointing, or even game-losing.  This led to a
half-joking exclamation of anger, said with a smile by someone with
German-accented English, "Thees eez - Boolshit!" which would then be
repeated in echoes by the gathering of giggling nerds in the room, followed
by much laughter.  You probably have to hear it said to think it's funny
because the inflection doesn't really come across in how I typed it.  But my
point is that, as funny as that running gag became, I personally feel those
moments detract from the game, and I believe Ardanet can help with that
problem.

So in summary, the GUI enhancements we have planned are not widely desired
by GCCG fans who seem to have learned and accepted the GCCG GUI.  However I
still believe that "play-assisting features and guides" is where Ardanet
will shine.  Unfortunately, we still have to build the GUI first in order to
get there from here, which means it may be difficult to recruit much more
support before we get into an alpha or beta release with version 1 and have
something that's minimally capable of playing a game.  From that point, the
most important thing we'll have moving forward is a MECCG-specific code base
for building this kind of game, which will allow us to work towards a piece
of software that fully implements all aspects of the game and knows the
special rules of every card.  The most important features will be those
which streamline play and quicken the pace, which I believe will bring more
fun to the game for even the most expert players who don't need
"play-assisting guides" as well as beginning players who do.  A faster paced
game would also be more fun in my opinion.

There you have it. my rambling thoughts about Ardanet after my experience at
Worlds 2007.

-- Ris

P.S. My gaming results from Worlds. I only won 1 game out of 8 that I played
all weekend, but I played some really good games nonetheless, and had a lot
of fun, so it was definitely worth it.  I got some good cards from the
sealed deck games and trades, some dragons, spanish dark minions, french and
english limited and unlimited wizards, and I picked up a bunch of lidless
eye: a starter and 9 boosters, adding to the weakest set in my collection,
though I haven't sorted it all out to see if I have the complete set yet.
Oh and I got some special cards too, drinking game cards, a couple of signed
cards, and a french promo I had never seen before.  It was cool to see so
many minion and fallen decks in action, and one guy playing balrog into the
finals with a good shot at the title - I don't know yet who won because I
had to leave a little early to make my flight.  I wish I had a chance to
play against the Balrog deck, but I saw so many strategies I'd never seen it
was great and I want to try them all!

Hi Josh H,

Thanks for setting this up!  I browsed over to the new site today and
registered there so I could take a look around.  I like the look of it very
much but I have a couple of questions/concerns/change requests.

First, since you mentioned running into problems with your permissions on
sourceforge, I enabled you as a project admin, so you should have full
priveleges now.  I don't mind continuing to host your new site at
ardanet.hunholz.com or back on sourceforge, the host location makes little
difference to me.  But I wanted to make sure you won't run into more
restrictions on sourceforge for any reason, just to keep things moving
smoothly.  The sourceforge user permission management is limiting, not
offering any "web developer" role, and didn't offer me any way to increase
your permission level for web development purposes only, so I just checked
the project admin box which should give you access to everything.

Is it still in your plans to add Bugzilla to the site?  We don't need a
serious bug tracker very soon, but I'd like to eventually get one up and
running rather than use a less organized forum in order to track the
revision history of a bug, link duplicates together, assign
responsibilities, mark them as closed, etc.  We can do all that "by hand"
with a Bugs forum like you set up, but I think Bugzilla would be more
powerful.  Would it still be possible to set that up at some point?  (I
don't actually have much experience with Bugzilla and I'm always open to
opposing opinions)

On the new portal ( http://ardanet.hunholz.com/bb3portal.php ) I would like
to add links to some more useful pages

-          the "Project Summary Page for Developers"
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/

-          the Ardanet wiki on sourceforge
http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/

-          the mailing list info and archives
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=192968

What about the "tasks" area on sourceforge?
http://sourceforge.net/pm/?group_id=192968  The idea for this area is to
keep track of who is doing what for the project, how far along they are, and
when they think they'll be done.  As the project leader, I find it important
to have something like this, especially given the "on again / off again"
nature of projects like this where each of us may be likely to take breaks
from it for weeks at a time now and then (such as I did recently leading up
to Worlds this past weekend).  Do you guys like this feature?  Would you
ever use it?  Should we use the one that comes with Sourceforge, or use
something else?  Or just report on our progress to the mailing list and
leave it at that?  I want you guys to have access to update that kind of
info yourselves, but I assume that as the project leader, I will do most of
the maintenance on keeping the info updated.  Do you think it's useful to
put a link to it on the portal ( http://ardanet.hunholz.com/bb3portal.php )
?  Or should we leave it as-is so that you have to go through the project
summary page to get there (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/) ?  Or
should I just disable/hide it?

Along those lines, I also intend to keep track of a "project roadmap
document" in the wiki, which will show up here:
http://ardanet.wiki.sourceforge.net/Project+Roadmap.  When I get around to
writing it up (probably later today, definitely by the end of the week) the
project roadmap will list the upcoming project goals similar to how I have
announced them in the News area in the past, but looking farther into the
future (and all of the planned features listed in the roadmap will link to
other wiki pages describing those features' design and implementation
details)  I'll keep the roadmap updated as we meet the various goals to show
what has been done and what remains.

Does the project roadmap make a separate "tasks" area unnecessary, or is it
still useful to separately track task assignments, who is working on what,
how far along they are, and when they expect to complete?  Or should we just
write that added info into the wiki pages?  Or is this kind of formal
tracking of task assignments and progress too much unnecessary hassle for
such a small team to bother with?

Does the new forum support avatar images and more detailed profiles so we
could define our roles in our profiles?  It's unnecessary fluff I admit, but
if it's only a simple a matter of turning on a switch, then I would vote do
it.  But if it would take any significant work, then I would say don't
bother.

On the project summary page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardanet/) we
have a link in a drop-down menu to Project > Web Site, which currently links
to http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/  I thought I saw something in the project
admin settings where you can redirect this link, so I'm looking for it, and
will redirect it to http://ardanet.hunholz.com/ if/when I find that option
again.  However, I gave away some of our cards at Worlds with the
http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/ address on them, so I want to make sure that
address continues to work, if even as an auto-redirect to
ardanet.hunholz.com.

That's all the comments I have on the website for now.  GREAT JOB and thanks
again for setting it up in time for Worlds.  I will follow up with a
separate note about my experience at Worlds 2007 this past weekend.

Best Regards,

Ris

  _____  

From: ard...@li...
[mailto:ard...@li...] On Behalf Of Josh
Hunholz
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 12:50 PM
To: Developer discussion
Subject: [Ardanet-developers] website update

Team,

After much fiddling around with the SourceForge webspace, and having little
success for a few reasons (some permissions issues, as well as their having
older version of key tools like PHP), I set the site up on my web server and
put a link on the ardanet.sourceforge.net site.  I have no problem hosting
the site there, as long as it's okay with the rest of you guys.  In fact, we
could register ardanet.com/org/net (whichever you prefer) and point it to
the server.  For now, you an access it either by going to
ardanet.sourceforge.net and following the link, or by going to
ardanet.hunholz.com directly.

As far as the software, I'm using PHPbb3 with the "Portal mod" that gives
the main page more of a website feel and lets us have a lot of control in
customizing it.  My original thought was to make a site, and then just
integrate the forum and a bug tracker, but I think this works for us just as
well.  I've also put in the comments from the posts on the Sourceforge
boards, so it has the same info. 

The admin account on the forums is username admin and password (same as
password Ris sent me for Mysql on Sourceforge. I won't put it in this note
since it can be accessed publicly.  Send me a note if you need it and I'll
reply with it).  If we all create accounts on the site, we can all have
admin access and that will list us as "team members".  

Okay, my lunch is over so I'm back to work, but wanted to get this info out
to the list as soon as I could.

--Josh <><

Team,

After much fiddling around with the SourceForge webspace, and having little
success for a few reasons (some permissions issues, as well as their having
older version of key tools like PHP), I set the site up on my web server and
put a link on the ardanet.sourceforge.net site.  I have no problem hosting
the site there, as long as it's okay with the rest of you guys.  In fact, we
could register ardanet.com/org/net (whichever you prefer) and point it to
the server.  For now, you an access it either by going to
ardanet.sourceforge.net and following the link, or by going to
ardanet.hunholz.com directly.

As far as the software, I'm using PHPbb3 with the "Portal mod" that gives
the main page more of a website feel and lets us have a lot of control in
customizing it.  My original thought was to make a site, and then just
integrate the forum and a bug tracker, but I think this works for us just as
well.  I've also put in the comments from the posts on the Sourceforge
boards, so it has the same info.

The admin account on the forums is username admin and password (same as
password Ris sent me for Mysql on Sourceforge. I won't put it in this note
since it can be accessed publicly.  Send me a note if you need it and I'll
reply with it).  If we all create accounts on the site, we can all have
admin access and that will list us as "team members".

Okay, my lunch is over so I'm back to work, but wanted to get this info out
to the list as soon as I could.

--Josh <><

Thanks for the update Josh, that's great news (both the website progress and
about your new job) and I completely agree about the cross-platform
approach.  As much as possible, we will keep the UI code separate from the
Engine code where UI stuff tends to be a lot more platform-specific and
Engine stuff tends to be pretty generic.  We should be able to at least
minimize the work required to port stuff over.

-- Ris

  _____  

From: ard...@li...
[mailto:ard...@li...] On Behalf Of Josh
Hunholz
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2007 7:54 PM
To: Developer discussion
Subject: Re: [Ardanet-developers] status update

Josh H: Can you give us an update on how it's coming with the website
development?  Have you been able to start on that at all or make any
progress?  Do you need anything from me to continue that effort?  Do you
think you can get this done by July 27 in time for Worlds? (or maybe a few
days or a week before then so we have a chance to test and refine it before
Worlds)

Yes, I'm hoping to get something up by July 8/9, or somewhere right around
there.  I also have been busy with work.  I started a new job 2 weeks ago
and am busy learning how things work and all the stuff that goes with a new
job.  But I did start a bit on the website and plan to work on it more next
weekend.  

A quick note about cross platform development:  one thing my new job will
let me do is take more classes in programming.  The company has large
in-house classes on many different topics, so I'm looking forward to getting
a class or two on some Linux C++ developing, so maybe I can help in that
area.  I agree for now we need to shoot for what you guys are familiar with,
but as much as possible let's try to leave the door open to add a linux
client later.  Just my thoughts. 

Okay, back to packing for a weekend trip.

--Josh H.

> *Josh H:* Can you give us an update on how it's coming with the website
> development?  Have you been able to start on that at all or make any
> progress?  Do you need anything from me to continue that effort?  Do you
> think you can get this done by July 27 in time for Worlds? (or maybe a few
> days or a week before then so we have a chance to test and refine it before
> Worlds)
>

Yes, I'm hoping to get something up by July 8/9, or somewhere right around
there.  I also have been busy with work.  I started a new job 2 weeks ago
and am busy learning how things work and all the stuff that goes with a new
job.  But I did start a bit on the website and plan to work on it more next
weekend.

A quick note about cross platform development:  one thing my new job will
let me do is take more classes in programming.  The company has large
in-house classes on many different topics, so I'm looking forward to getting
a class or two on some Linux C++ developing, so maybe I can help in that
area.  I agree for now we need to shoot for what you guys are familiar with,
but as much as possible let's try to leave the door open to add a linux
client later.  Just my thoughts.

Okay, back to packing for a weekend trip.

--Josh H.

Hi Team,

I just wanted to give a little status update here since it's been a while.

First, the outcry for cross-platform compatibility a few weeks ago sort of
took the wind out of my sails and made me re-examine the overall development
plan.  I sat back and thought about it for a while, and it comes down to
resources / human resources.  We just don't have the developers to do
cross-platform work, so I think in the spirit of continuing to get anything
done at all, we will continue to focus on Windows only.  This will change
only if we get more volunteer developers who are skilled in non-Windows
development.

Before I could get back to work on Ardanet, my company sent me to New Jersey
for a week on business and ever since that trip I have not been able to get
back into Ardanet development in the evenings.  I am not abandoning this
project, just had to put it on hold briefly.  I will probably not have time
for any code development between now and the MECCG Worlds at the end of
July.

However, I will be working on getting the business cards done to hand out at
Worlds, and I still want to push for a better website before Worlds on July
27.

Josh H: Can you give us an update on how it's coming with the website
development?  Have you been able to start on that at all or make any
progress?  Do you need anything from me to continue that effort?  Do you
think you can get this done by July 27 in time for Worlds? (or maybe a few
days or a week before then so we have a chance to test and refine it before
Worlds)

I just checked the site and I see there is a "coming soon" page up there
now.  Yay!  That's already a nice improvement over the raw FTP directory
view we had before, so I guess you were able to get started and at least
figure out how to upload files to the site.  That's a good start.  Can you
give us an update on the rest of your progress on the website?

-- Ris

Hi Team,

WARNING: disorganized brainstorming rambling follows.

I was very briefly talking with Josh B and he got me thinking about features
for Ardanet related to inventory management for my collection of real
physical cards.

My only prior concept of card collection features or anything that would
allow Ardanet to represent the collecting aspect of the game was centered
around the GCCG model of giving you virtual money and a limited starting
collection and then allowing players to trade from that collection, in
effect recreating the entire collecting aspect of the game in the online
world.  My opinion about that approach is like, sure OK I'm bet that's
appealing to other people, but IMO it defeats part of the point of playing
online, which is partly about letting you play with those special rare cards
that you don't own.  For Ardanet, since I don't personally care about using
those features, I didn't want to go there, so no such features are designed,
and I think I even documented it in a few places that we have no intention
to support the collecting aspect of the game in any way.

However, I never thought about crossing the line between the virtual game
and the real world, and I was never too particular about my own collection
of real cards in terms of trying to collect all the cards - I just tried to
get the cards I needed for the decks I wanted.  Now that Josh and I have
both been checking the inventory on our collections, talking about it, and
thinking about it, I'm realizing how nice it would be to have some software
assistance to keep track of the inventory of my collection.

Josh B put it well the other day when he mentioned the simple feature idea
(paraphrased): it would be nice if the Ardanet deck builder could tell me
whether the deck I designed is possible with the cards I really own, or
whether I'm missing some of those cards.  Ya know. BEFORE I go digging
through my thousands of cards.

Of course you'd have to enter in how many of each card you own and keep it
up to date, but you're probably doing this in a spreadsheet or word document
anyway. such as the docs I committed to SVN the other day. I figure we've
got a database of all the cards as it is to support the features we need in
Ardanet, and a deck is not far off from a collection of cards, so it's not a
very big stretch to recycle the deck editing code into a collection editing
tool and add some features along these lines.

I think that is precisely the best way to implement it: as a deck document.
There would be modified UI features for editing your collection vs. editing
a deck.

The normal deck building features ignore the site deck.  The movement path
interface we've designed creates the assumption that everyone has a complete
site deck.  Arg, this plan is flawed, and I keep forgetting.  It should be
possible, but optional, to create a site deck for your deck, to enable our
special movement path interface to suggest sites from a "short list" of
preferred sites that you selected when building your deck.  You would pick
this from a checkbox or it would be one of the search options.  Every site
will be available for every movement/hazard (indicated as tapped as
applicable) but you could restrict the search filter based on your deck's
preferred list, which is that deck's site deck.  The purpose of adding site
cards when building your deck in Ardanet is to serve as a reminder of which
sites are good for you with this resource strategy, as opposed to my site
deck for tournaments which is a complete collection of every legal site card
just in case I need to go somewhere I didn't plan on.

Anyway, that implies some difference between the collection management UI
and the deck building UI in terms of managing site cards.  For example, you
would never include more than 1 of any site card in your deck, but you would
want to list any number for your entire collection.

That goes for every card.  In general the collection UI would disable all
the deck building restriction checks of the deck editor UI in terms of
warning you that you used more than 3 of any given card, or that you have
more than 1 of the same site, or more than 1 of any unique cards, etc.  All
those features should be hidden from the collection UI.

There's also a difference in terms of how you edit a collection vs. how you
edit a deck.  When editing a collection you're going to look up cards
primarily by name, set, rarity.  When editing a deck you're going to look up
cards mostly by card type (hazard vs. resource, etc) and other stats,
sometimes by name, and almost never by set or rarity.  So the most visible
search options may change, unless all the search options are equally visible
in a common interface for card database search engine used by both the deck
editor and collection editor.

Some feature ideas.

-          Deck builder warning: this deck uses the following cards that are
not in your collection, so you can't make this deck in real life

-          Collection comparer.  Let Ardanet compare 2 Ardanet collection
files to suggest trades or sales.

o        We could add trader and seller info to the player profile info such
as shipping and billing info, a working hyperlink to your paypal account,
etc.  Then when connected to another player online, you could easily see
their rules for shipping cards, and how to pay them with paypal, etc.

-          Generate reports

o        Need list or Extras list

*         Based on 1 of each

*         Based on ability to make every legal deck (seeking 3 of each
non-unique)

o        Export the list to HTML or text format

*         HTML would use a template file that the end-user could edit

o        View just the cards you're missing from a given set, or just the
rares, etc.  There's more we can do here.

-          Add a data field for card price.  Now Ardanet is managing your
sales for you.

o        We could store a card price in the master card database,
representing the "book value" of that card

o        The player profile could have a standard deviation from the book
value in terms of x% so that cards in your collection would default to 95%
of the book value when you generate your extras list

o        This allows Ardanet to calculate the book value or user-specified
value of your collection.  This also lets you calculate an estimated outlay
you'd have to spend to complete your collection.

o        It would be interesting to calculate the estimated value of a
sealed box of boosters by using Ardanet to generate random booster packs *
36 * the price of the cards selected, to see if it's worth buying that box
of MELE that just showed up for sale on eBay.  You'd have to generate a
bunch of these to see how the results fall out to find the mean, median,
etc.

o        As Ardanet connects to other players and finds non-zero prices set
for various cards, it could automatically record the prices it sees in order
to track a more valid "book value" for every card, based on the average
price you saw people selling their cards.

We have the detailed rarity info for our database.  We should be good there.

The player profile document should contain the card collection, rather than
make it a separate document.  This would share some data from a deck
document and recycle code from the deck editor and other GUIs, but would
technically be part of the player profile document, so the views would be
associated with CplayerProfileDoc rather than CdeckDoc.

I have been puzzling over how to implement a deck document when it comes to
multiple copies of the same card.  Should it be N objects of the
CcardInstance class used for game documents?  Or should it be 1 object a new
class derived from CcardTemplate called, let's say, CcardInDeck, indicating
a data member CcardInDeck::m_nNumCopies = N.

Considering the idea of recycling a lot of these Uis and data structures for
both decks and a much larger collection inventory, it remains as puzzling.

I'd like to make another class, that's for sure.  The CcardInstance class
includes a lot of in-game information like tapped status (and a lot more)
that doesn't apply for a card in a deck.

The deck will not be merely a list of card template IDs because that creates
too much of a binding between the card database document and all your decks.
I want copies of all the card template information in the deck files so you
can get an upgrade warning if you've updated your card database since the
last time you opened this deck, so it can tell you exactly what changed.
This would be particularly useful for finding the errata changes that have
an impact on a given deck, or telling you the net book value change of your
deck.

So we'll have a new class for a card in a collection of cards.
CcardInstance will be used exclusively for cards in a game, while
CcardInCollection objects will be used for cards in a deck or your
collection.  This will add a data member for how many copies of that card in
the collection, CcardInCollection::m_nNumCopies.

Normally if you have 100x Doors of Night, it's not reasonable to have 100
array entries for "Doors of Night."  There should be 1 array entry with
"Doors of Night x100."  This should be the general rule.  The same applies
for deck editing.

As an advanced feature, I figure the pricing, sales, and advanced trade
features are for ersion 3+ or whatever.  Later on, I think we can make it so
you can optionally add another instance of that CcardInCollection object
instead of incrementing the m_nNumCopies number, to have independent
m_nNumCopies values probably both set to 1, in order to track additional
info about the multiple different copies of your cards.  I'm thinking about
using your collection management for card sales and you have a pristine The
One Ring Limited for $55 and a "well played" but near mint Unlimited The One
Ring for $35 - you want two instances of The One Ring in your collection,
but you need two separate CcardInCollection::m_nPrice values, so in this
case, instead of making a single instance of the CcardInCollection object
with CcardInCollection::m_nNumCopies = 2, you make two separate
CcardInCollection objects in the array, each with m_nNumCopies = 1.  You
enter the notes in the card errata field.  This doesn't really apply to deck
editing because you always want to see Doors of Night x3 instead of Doors of
Night, Doors of Night, Doors of Night in your deck editor.

Would be nice to use the collection manager to help me find which of my real
decks I left a certain card in from my collection, if I know I own that card
because I entered it in Ardanet. I suppose what I would do is enter all my
real decks into Ardanet as well, and store them in the same subfolder
together . if I had so many decks constructed that I needed this feature. I
could run a Search all Files kind of operation to search all my decks in
this folder for a given card.

That's all I got for now.  Overkill, I know, sorry.  Just trying to think
ahead to make sure the data structures will be extensible into all the
features we'll ever want.

-- Ris

I just felt like writing down some wildly unrealistic future features
tonight.  This is all just off-the-cuff brainstorming material to read some
time when you're bored and put in the back of your mind to chew on, or get
excited about right now and write me back! :P

I was reading over this rules variant called Unsung Heroes
http://www.meccg.net/dforum/viewtopic.php?t=330 and it got me thinking ahead
to a version >=2 feature. this scenario adds a set of rules which are
somewhat complicated and it would be nice to have the software remind us
about these special rules in effect.  This makes me wonder if we could have
some way to "mod" Ardanet with custom scenarios like this, made by the users
based on some kind of custom scenario engine and editor.  I think a lot of
people are into designing custom scenarios like this, so it could be a
useful feature.

I don't quite have a clear enough vision of Ardanet to imagine exactly how
it would be modded by players, but it's something to think about.

For Unsung Heroes in particular, it looks like mostly deck-building
restrictions.  The part about no characters with mind >6 is a simple
restrictions, but "except for your avatar's home site" is a trickier rule to
define in a data-only kind of custom scenario file.

There are also custom rules about playing resources based on your avatar's
abilities instead of their own abilities (warrior/sage/diplomat kind of
stuff) and I'm not sure whether we can even check the playability of
resources like that.  I'd like to if possible, just to give a
user-overridable warning that a card appears to be unplayable by that
character, and we have data to cover most of those cases already for
anything simple like "warrior only."  But it has to be just a warning you
can ignore in case there are effects in play that would make this
warrior-only card playable on this non-warrior character for who knows why.
Anyway I'm just rambling now.  My point was, the way Ardanet handles
resource playing restrictions is still unclear, so it's even more unclear
what to say about player-made custom scenario modules which modify that
behavior.  It would change if/when you get a warning.  Still, it's something
to think about in the back of your mind as we move forward.

This also got me thinking about a slightly different idea: single player
campaign scenarios for Ardanet.  Basically you would create a deck for the
usual kind of solitaire variation, drawing from only the hazards and playing
as many on yourself as you can during your movement hazard phase, but we
could enhance it to put permanent events in play at the start, add special
rules, and make Ardanet track additional objectives. like I'm imagining a
Hobbit scenario where you're programmed to be Gandalf and you start with the
full Dwarven company at the Shire and have to perform a successful influence
check against a hobbit on the first turn, not necessarily Bilbo.  Then the
movement is preprogrammed by the scenario to take you to most of the site
cards from the Hobbit in the correct order and also programmed to throw a
deck of very similar hazards at you while you draw from a deck of similar
resources, to come up with a MECCG game that plays out a lot like the Hobbit
but all shuffled around.  It's a fuzzy idea.  Maybe do it as a more
free-form game starting as Gandalf at Rivendel and you get to go around
recruiting/influencing the various dwarves before heading to the Shire to
play a hobbit card and then moving on to the lonely mountain, etc.  This
gives me an idea for a "mystery scenario" kind of thing where you would only
know your next objective, i.e. "bring 13 Dwarves, at least one of which must
be listed on King Under the Mountain" and once you complete this, you find
out your next objective is to "bring any hobbit character into play at his
home site.  The influence check is modified by -10 because respectable
Hobbits simply don't go on adventures."  So you go and play A Friend or
Three with your company of 13 dwarves to win over Frodo, and so on,
unlocking the next objective to guide you along a similar story as the
Hobbit - or some other story you invent, which could open some cool
opportunities - and you play it all out with MECCG cards, basically
scrambling the Tolkien lore in a blender to come up with some fun stories
and single-player scenarios.

So maybe for version 2 or 3 we can come up with some kind of data-driven
simplistic model to define custom scenarios like this, something that won't
require hard-core programming, or.

Here's a thought, maybe in a future version when we implement all of the
card rules in the code, which I'd love to do some day, we will do that by
making a custom scripting language to define the cards.  Most of the cards'
rules are made from very similar constructs and they follow a consistent
logic, so it should be fairly easy to convert the wording of every card into
a custom programming language if we create our parser around the consistent
phrases they already use on the cards.  The parser would give error messages
where it finds wordings we haven't programmed it for, and we'd either
enhance the parser for that new language and special kind of rule, or we
would fix the wording of the card to fit our parser.  This would take a long
time and a lot of work but it would be fun and I'd love to have a completely
automated game that really knows all the rules.

Think how fast the games would go with a software assistant correctly
interpreting all of the rules and cards for you?  Telling you at all times
every number in play counting all bonuses and special effects and capable of
giving you the break down, as well as showing you which of the cards in your
hand are currently playable. 

Then it's just a matter of enhancing this custom programming language for
these additional kinds of rules to program the custom scenarios.

Unfortunately, all of the above is a requirement before we can tackle the AI
in version 5 or 6 or something. we need a fully programmed understanding of
every rule and every card before we can program the computer to play the
game.  The computer will never build it's own deck, so it will be able to
make heuristic decisions about each card based on, probably a power value we
manually assign to each card, plus points for combinations with other cards
in play, plus checks that it won't be immediately canceled, and so on.  It's
completely within the realm of possibility, but will take a lot of
programming.

That's more than enough rambling for one day. next time I'll shut up and
work on programming some of the ideas we already have instead of adding to
the work load lol :P

-- Ris

That time works fine for me.  I'm in the Eastern time zone (Raleigh, NC, to
be specific).  I should have no problem running either application.  I have
a windows box I can use for it.

--Josh H.

On 5/12/07, Ris Misner <rm...@ne...> wrote:
>
>  Hi Josh H,
>
>
>
> I'd like to set up a schedule for monthly team meetings for the 3 of us to
> gather online for some real time chat.  These meetings should be fairly
> brief, just about 15-20 minutes unless we get really excited about talking
> about the project.  I just want to make sure we all have a chance to
> communicate in real time on a regular basis and keep the momentum going.
>
>
>
> Would you be available on the first Saturday of every month, at 12:00 noon
> US Eastern Time?  (17:00 GMT / Universal Time)  BTW, what time zone are you
> in, if you don't mind my asking?
>
>
>
> The first one would be June 2, a couple of weeks from now.
>
>
>
> I cleared this time with Josh B already, but we're flexible.  I think
> Saturday or Sunday, the first or last of the month, will be the easiest
> recurring pattern to remember and stick to, but it's not *completely*impossible to arrange for a brief meeting during the week.
>
>
>
> We were planning to use Microsoft MSN Windows Live Messenger (or whatever
> it's called now) as well as Ventrilo for voice chat (www.ventrilo.com) It
> occurs to me these are both Windows software and you told me you run Linux.
> Can you boot to Windows to run these tools, or do you have anything
> compatible?
>
>
>
> Anybody know any websites that would be a good cross-platform alternative
> by virtue of being a website?  Or any other cross-platform solution?
>
>
>
> -- Ris
>
>
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> _______________________________________________
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> Ard...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ardanet-developers
>
>

http://www.vistaprint.com/ looks pretty good.  I will check it out more.
The free options are limited to some premade images, but there's a web one
that's sort of a generic website card, and another with an eye that's blue
but I could color them all in red by hand so it's like The Eye LOL.  I'm
still exploring it for options to use our own logo.

> I would maybe change the second sentance. Make
> it something like "NetMECCG and GCCG were good programs in their day, but
we
> knew they could be better, so we designed Ardanet." Otherwise I think it
> sounds good.

I love that wording - this is now the new public description of the project,
and what I'll put on the business cards:

"A superior solution for playing Middle Earth: the Collectible Card Game
online with other players, including play-assisting features and guides.
NetMECCG and GCCG were good programs in their day, but we knew they could be
better, so we designed Ardanet."

(Sourceforge has a limit of 254 characters and the above is 253, hence "A"
instead of "The" superior solution.)

The business cards will abbreviate MECCG but I prefer to spell it out on the
website.  This is also the description that comes up in sourceforge project
searches, and still has the MECCG substring for searching.

-- Ris

Hi Josh H,

I'd like to set up a schedule for monthly team meetings for the 3 of us to
gather online for some real time chat.  These meetings should be fairly
brief, just about 15-20 minutes unless we get really excited about talking
about the project.  I just want to make sure we all have a chance to
communicate in real time on a regular basis and keep the momentum going.

Would you be available on the first Saturday of every month, at 12:00 noon
US Eastern Time?  (17:00 GMT / Universal Time)  BTW, what time zone are you
in, if you don't mind my asking?

The first one would be June 2, a couple of weeks from now.

I cleared this time with Josh B already, but we're flexible.  I think
Saturday or Sunday, the first or last of the month, will be the easiest
recurring pattern to remember and stick to, but it's not completely
impossible to arrange for a brief meeting during the week.

We were planning to use Microsoft MSN Windows Live Messenger (or whatever
it's called now) as well as Ventrilo for voice chat (www.ventrilo.com
<http://www.ventrilo.com/> ) It occurs to me these are both Windows software
and you told me you run Linux.  Can you boot to Windows to run these tools,
or do you have anything compatible?

Anybody know any websites that would be a good cross-platform alternative by
virtue of being a website?  Or any other cross-platform solution?

-- Ris

>
> I promised Josh Hunholz that I would make documentation my top priority
> until he felt caught up.
>
>
>
> Attn Josh Hunholz: Did I succeed?  Do you feel like you understand where
> we're at and what we're doing?  Any questions?
>
>
Yes, I feel I have a good grasp of what is going on now.  I still have some
reading to do to get caught up with all your e-mails, but that gives me a
great catch-up to where your discussions are at now.  Thanks!

--Josh (H)

Hi Team,

I reviewed all the documentation last night and I believe everything we've
discussed and planned is now documented somewhere now, so this is good
progress.

What remains to be done for documentation is mainly organization.

There are a number of topics we've discussed, but we don't have the end
results of the debate put together in one place.  We've got the original
design somewhere, then some comments somewhere else, then some more comments
somewhere else, and so on.

I enabled the Wiki area that sourceforge gives us.  I think this would be a
good way to organize the updated information, which is the next step.  I
suggest the Wiki because it will be easier to maintain than the obtuse
Documents area with lots of cross-referencing involved.  I haven't put
anything into the wiki yet, but we need to go through all of the other
documentation, and the design discussions archived from this mailing list,
and break it up into various discrete pages about one topic at a time, with
links to all the related info, and additionally create an index.

We need this documentation to be organized in a way that it's easy to find
the latest thinking about any particular issue.

So I'll be working on this, and anyone else who wants to chip in is welcome
to it.  That's also one of the nice things about the Wiki, is that we can
all hammer on it at the same time with minimal conflicts, as long as we're
editing different pages at the same time.

Wikis are pretty flexible - that's the point - so feel free to dive in on it
and start editing.  If the arrangement you come up with turns out to be
inadequate, it can be changed. <-- convincing myself here, as well as you.

I promised Josh Hunholz that I would make documentation my top priority
until he felt caught up.

Attn Josh Hunholz: Did I succeed?  Do you feel like you understand where
we're at and what we're doing?  Any questions?

After reviewing the docs, I also saw that when I opened the sourceforge
site, I set two goals:

1)       bring up the network framework

2)       bring up the GUI framework

As of last night, we accomplished the initial bringup on both of those, and
we have a shell we can chat in and build on.  So this is a great milestone,
but now I need to set the next two top priority goals.  I'm going to make it
3 goals this time.

1)       Prepare for Worlds '07

a.       Prepare handout materials for Ardanet promotion

b.       Get my game back in shape, practice rolling high numbers, etc

2)       Finish documentation effort

a.       The Wiki unless someone has any better ideas

b.       I should lay out a project roadmap to plan all the steps and
milestones, so I'll count that as part of this effort too

c.       Actually, finishing this documentation effort is part of preparing
for Worlds, so that anyone I encourage to visit the site will have the best
possible documentation.

d.       This also includes creating something - anything - at
http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/ 

3)       Enhance the GUI framework for dockable frames with the general
features of how to manage all the views

a.       We have 2 game views already, so this should qualify as a
demonstration of N views, so step 1 is accomplished with the GUI framework

b.       Next step is to enhance it with the more advanced windowing
features to make sure this framework will be viable

c.       Actual "game area view" content for the views will come later

d.       I will define more precise requirements on this goal soon.  There's
a good list in the original NetMECCGv2 Ideas document, a bulleted list
showing the key features of the dockable frames.  I want to get these
features done before creating a bunch more game views for all the different
areas.

We got the last two goals done in a month.  Let's try to get these 3 done
before Worlds, July 27, 2007.

-- Ris

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