Anywhere Board Games / News: Recent posts

DropBox is removing its public directories in a month, so until Google Hangouts shuts down Hangouts Apps (April 25, 2017). I was able to get the Hangout App resources on an AWS EC2 Instance. Enjoy gaming!

I'm happy to announce that we've moved our source code repository to GitHub: https://github.com/rbuccigrossi/Anywhere_Board_Games to encourage forks and pull requests! We're in the process of moving our latest releases and documentation there as well.

Butch

Today's release adds the ability to redirect a session to a new URL. This is useful in using a local ABG server in a Google+ Hangout Session, which then allows you to use the same game in your mobile devices as in your Hangout.

With the v0.120705 release, we happily announce the availability of ABG as a Google+ Hangout App. It can be started by clicking the Hangout button at the top of http://www.anywhereboardgames.com/ . We released the source for the hangout in v0.120705.

We still prefer Google Chrome on the Android (it's just faster), but with a little bit of tweaking, with today's release we now work pretty well on the default Android browser (fixing an issue with piece and screen flashing). In addition, my daughter accidentally cleared the board during a game, so we added a confirmation dialog to make sure you really want to clear the board...

The latest release of ABG brings a consistent feel and better stability on touch devices (iOS and Android). Specifically, touch-drag events now initiate multi-selection of board pieces (just like using the mouse). You can still pan and zoom with touches, but you first need to bring up a pop-up menu (by clicking on a piece or on the background). In addition, to make staking decks easier, pieces are now stacked at the location of the lowest piece.
Finally, we were able to do some testing on Google Chrome beta for Android, and it works very well! So we suggest Google Chrome, Safari (iOS), and Firefox for use with ABG.

Now you can play Agricola Express without a paper and pencil. We used the new "attach HTML to a piece" feature to allow users to interact with check boxes and text boxes on the score card.

In the latest release, Anywhere Board Games adds Agricola Express (a dice game under the Creative Commons License), 3-D die renderings (with POV-Ray source), and the ability to attach custom HTML to pieces (to lay the groundwork for links and scripting).

In today's released version 0.120305, Anywhere Board Games adds Go, Chess, and Reversi to its list of pre-configured games. From these samples we hope to encourage others to use ABG to develop their own games.

The latest release of Anywhere Board Games now has:
- A Words (on ABG) game!
- The ability to open boards from URLs and a select list of pre-made boards
- Common board pieces including dice, a flipping coin, and player shields
- The Windows installer now uses Apache (which provides much faster update performance with multiple clients)

With this version (v0.120219) we finally roll out a simplified Windows installer that allows users to quickly install ABG with Mongoose and PHP. Also we fixed locking issues on Windows and timeout issues on both Linux and Windows.

The latest release of Anywhere Board Games moves it into beta territory, adding full support for many board and card games (allowing stacking, flipping, shuffling, player shields, and loading and saving of games). We added two sets of pieces, one for a pseudo-3D game of checkers, and another with a deck of cards. Next will be Words, and then turning our attention to a Windows install package.

Anywhere Board Games finally has its first PHP/HTML public release. While still in alpha, it has enough features to permit multi-player single-sided piece games (like checkers and chess), with support for iPhone, Android, and HTML5 browsers. Pieces can be imported and rotated, and the board state can be saved and restored.

Adding networking to the original .NET version proved to be annoying, and porting to Mono also proved to be odd. In the end, we *really* wanted this to be a web app, and since HTML5 has dramatically progressed we're re-implementing the system as a web app.

Currently work is proceeding in SVN under /branches/html5/ . Currently you can add and move pieces, and infrastructure is in place for pop-up menus and locking pieces. More importantly, the back-end networking completely works, so you can access the same site with multiple browsers (including iPhone and iPad) moving pieces.

The first Board Game Arena is now out, the wiki is up at http://boardgamearena.sourceforge.net/ , and we're off! Play board and card games with multiple mouses around the same computer...