Re: [cplp-dev] Re: What's next

[Petras K. <mox...@de...>]

Friday, October 11, 2002, 3:19:29 AM, Andrew Brosnan rašė:

> I think it would be useful to try to describe or define how the game and
> program are going to work in writing. Starting off with perhaps even a
> few sentences or paragraphs, and refining it to become more and more
> detailed. My approach to writing anything but simple programs is 'If you
> can't state it in English(or some natural language), you probably aren't
> ready to write the code. That's how I feel now. If you asked me to
> describe to you how the overall program will work, I couldn't. Does
> anyone else feel this way?
[...]
> I think we have a good first goal: making it possible for a player to
> move in some world (not interacting with anything but walls). I suggest
> that we write up the details of how we plan to accomplish this.

Here I am going to present my view of the first stages of the game.
Feel free to express your opinion and comment on this.

The goal is to make a charactermove in the world and interact with
walls. So there are a couple of objects that we must pay attention to:

a)  a character,
b)  a world map, which consists of:
    1) walls;
    2) empty space.

We also have a client/server structure. In my opinion, the server has
the following duties:

a)  generating the map (or reading it from somewhere),
b)  generating the character (in theory it could be generated by the
client, but I think it is easier to leave it for the server),
c)  transmitting the map information and character information to the
client via some protocol,
d)  waiting for the client to give instructions (which at this stage
would only be "move north/south/east/west")
e)  process the instructions from the client and respond witha status
message (either "successful" or "not successful -- bumped into a
wall")

The client has these things to do:
a)  handshake with a server, get a map and character data,
b)  somehow display this data on screen (ASCII art like nethack?),
c)  take instructions from the player and send them to the server,
d)  update map information internally and redraw the map (if the move
was successful, if not -- display a message why it was not successful)

The communication between client/server could be over XML-RPC.

In terms of Perl, map and character could be instances of object
classes "map" and "character" respectively. Keeping objects separate
would probably help us when we will want to expand or add another game
theme.

This is my view of the game and I would like you to present yours.

> btw, I wondered about using IRC. I don't know if this would be
> [helpful|chaos]. And then there's time differences...just a thought.

IRC is great, but personally I am pretty busy at work (where I have a
normal connection to the internet) and I can only use internet to
check emails at home. Well, if you would agree on a time, I hope I can
manage it (Unless it's at 3am at my local time). By the way, to my
understanding there is almost 50/50 split between Americans and
Europeans, is that right? (I'm from Lithuanian, so this is Europe).

--
Sėkmės,
 Petras Kudaras                            mailto:mox...@de...