Re: [Rails-devel] track/route awareness

[Mark S. <mar...@gm...>]

Back many years ago early 90's I started a personal project to implement the
18xx game system on my computer, using C++. When JAVA came out, I translated
what I had done to JAVA and then put it away for a decade. When I found your
SourceForge project back late 2006 I brought it back out and made progress.
My initial focus, and still to be fully complete to my satisfaction is
drawing and manipulating the board, tiles, track, stations, etc. My feeling
is that the board is central to the entire game system, and if not done
properly, you can't really play the game properly.

I have reviewed what your Rails project does with the board, and the fact
that you make use of GIF images for the tiles, tokens, etc. I see at least
two distinct issues with your current implemenation, one is the tokens are
just a circle of a specific color. If you look at 1835, or 1837 there are
minor companies that share the SAME color, so that it is very hard to tell
from your map which minor company starts where. The other issue as I know
from your forum has not yet been solved is scaling the map up and down in
size.

My approach was to use the track connections, station locations, types, and
stuff to draw the board and tiles via Vector Graphics. This gives me not
only a very clean drawing, but one that can scale up and down in size with
little extra coding efforts. The tokens I draw are filled circles with the
company Abbreviation/Number centered in the token. I also draw my default
size larger, about the same size as the tiles if you hold them up to the
screen. One other advantage is that since I draw the track segment by
segment, I can draw routes for different trains in different colors, so that
you can tell at a glance if they conflict, and the program will know if they
would re-use track and say "NAY, no re-use buddy!". But I have not gotten it
to that specific point yet. but I am close to actually implementing a way to
have the user pick out the routes.

Now this last point brings up a philosphical question of game
implementation. Should the Player pick the routes, or should the computer
auto-calculate the routes to maximize income? The game rules specifically
state the player picks routes, and has to live with the mistake. However,
sometimes in some games (like 1853), you may want to maximize your mail run,
or maximize your revenue at different times.

If there is intrest, I could be enticed to provide a copy of a JAVA JAR File
that could be run to see if my approach sparks interest. I feel that it
might be worth considering a possible integration of my map/tile routines
into Rails... but only the current product looks promising to those
currently implementing.

Let me know what you all think.
Mark Smith

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 5:05 PM, Jonathan Ferro <jon...@ya...>wrote:

> Several years ago I posted an idea for an algorithm based on computing
> half-routes (starting from stations an only going one direction) but I've
> never proved to myself that the filtering needed (to combine them into full
> routes and not conflict with other trains in a corp) would be practical.  I
> think that was the last time it was openly discussed, and I've never looked
> into the code to see how that would fit with the current game-state
> internals.
>
> -- Jonathan
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: brett lentz <wak...@gm...>
> To: Development list for Rails: an 18xx game <
> rai...@li...>
> Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 8:10:11 AM
> Subject: Re: [Rails-devel] track/route awareness
>
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 2:49 AM, Michał Bażyński <ba...@tl...> wrote:
> > hello,
> >   is anybody working on things like recognizing legal track builds or
> > calculating revenue? not that I am ready to announce I intend to do it,
> > but if it's a work in progress already it won't make sense for me to
> > look into that problem at all...
> >
> > mike bazynski
>
>
> Nobody has stepped forward to work on route awareness.  We have a
> basic implementation for matching legal plays by tracking which sides
> of each hex have track, and lining them up to the sides of each other
> hex that has track.
>
> If you would like to work on route calculation, you're welcome to it.
>
> ---Brett.
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