Online Cardgame System / News: Recent posts

I have just finished implementing game creation parameters. These are parameters that the client sets when creating a game. I have implemented a game score limit in hearts/euchre/spades as well as implementing the stick the dealer option in Euchre.

The Win32 client has been augmented to query the master server and then requery each individual server. It creates 8 threads (can be changed) to do the querying of each server. The client has also been changed so that it can automatically connect to a server via the command line.

Our newest developer, Joe, has been working hard to create a 500 implemention! 500 fans rejoice. Should be ready shortly.

Individual servers can now publish their existence to a master server (don't worry, it's an option). The client can then query this master server for a list of active servers. Then the client can query each server for specific, connectionless information (number of clients, etc).

Hearts is fully working and in CVS. The AI was adapted from the hearts project at http://hearts.sourceforge.net -- also a neat project. The server is still running at perilith.com. Go try it out!

Hearts is in CVS right now, and is fully functional, except I haven't made the bots smart yet. They can play a correct game, just not well at all. I'll be implementing some intelligence in them soon, and we'll be having a new release with working Hearts and some other little fixes in a short while.

I think we're going to have to learn some more card games if we want to implement any more!

Finally, a new release! With the release of 0.9.0, we have decided to move to beta status. This release contains, among other things:
* A Java client (hooray!)
* Bot support in the games
* Extra fun

Have a download and let us know what you think!

I have a server running at perilith.com, port 6997 if you want to easily try it out.

I seemed to have lost one of the files to the java implementation and i forgot to CVS add it. So be patient, in a few days it'll be back up and running. On a side note, I've implemented a Euchre bot so people can play the computer now. In addition, we are also completing database modules so the server can use a DB to store user names

The java client is complete and is ready for beta testing! It is designed to run as an applet inside a browser and in the source files there is a client.html page which you can use to load the applet. Information is passed via the HTML parameters.
The version uses Swing so it requires JDK1.3 to work.

I've converted the chat text area from RTF to HTML. Therefore you can do a lot of cool things like display formatted text. It uses IE4, so that is required. But anybody with a Windows PC these days will have that regardless. Hope you enjoy!
It uses tidy internally so that a client can't mess up tags (for instance if a client says <b>hi\0, then everything else would be bold).

Finally, we released! We spent some time stress testing the server, and fixed some issues we found from that. The server currently compiles fine on Win32 and Linux 2.4 kernel, and the client is Win32-only right now. The system currently contains implementations of Euchre and Spades. Download it and try it out!

(Incidentally, automake and libtoolize can bite me.)

We now have an implementation of Euchre, and a functioning client and server. We'll formally have an alpha release soon and setup a server so we can have some testing and feedback. We obviously need more games, and some sort of *nix client, but we're moving along.

We're still alive, apparently. Got all the autoconf/automake stuff worked out, except for using libtool for the dynamic modules. I punted and just used my original makefile for them. Maybe someday I'll figure that out. Anyway, we will be writing the gmae protocol soon, and actually making some games.

We have dynamically loaded game support for Linux now ;-)

Server currently compiles under Debian GNU/Linux, but the game modules aren't working yet. I need to read up on dynamically loadable modules. I also need to bite the bullet and learn autoconf, to make the server really portable. The code is getting better, we have some more free time now. It should really take off over winter break.

The source for OCS has been imported into our CVS tree. The server currently builds on Win32, but needs a few tweaks to build under POSIX. I'll fix that soon. The client is Win32 only. Right now clients can connect and chat. Game creation and the like will be added soon.