[Rails-devel] RE: First goal?

[<wak...@ea...>]

> It seems the files arrived with CR+LF line endings,
> so they showed up double-spaced in Eclipse.

Ah, yep.  That's likely due to my using Eclipse under Windows XP.

I'll see if I can't find a setting in Eclipse to tweak that.

Failing that, Eclipse does have a source formatter that, once you define how you like your code formatted, you can have it sweep through and reformat everything.

I don't expect everyone to use my coding style, or to even like it. I figure, as soon as we have a significant enough amount of code, we should layout some sort of formal rules about what style we're going to keep the code in. However, for now, any patches you have, I'll do the reformatting before I commit it to CVS if I feel it's necessary.

>I"m reasonably proficient in Java, so maybe I can help,
> although we"ll have to see how things develop.

Great!  I'm happy to have you aboard.

>My main question for now is: what kind of animal you have in mind for
> a first working prototype? A servlet? Applet? What kind of user interface?

I expect to write a stand-alone app, and probably employ Java Web Start at some point to aid with running the app over the web. I'm taking many cues from both Vassal and Colossus, as they seem to have trod this path already.

The UI is probably the biggest thing I'm looking for suggestions on.

I'm definitely interested in making the app look and feel similar to the old 1830 PC game. If you haven't seen/played it, you can find it on many abandonware sites around the web. While the 1830 UI wasn't perfect, it did have a lot of things I really like that, in the long-term, I'd like to attempt to clone, such as how they handled the stock rounds and the purchasing of little companies. However, one of the areas I definitely want to diverge from that old UI is to attempt to keep as much relevant game information on a single screen as possible.

One of my bigger complaints about the 1830 PC game was that there were separate screens for just about everything. To me, this seems a bit clumsy, and probably has more to do with the limitations of developing a DOS-based game than anything else.

The number one thing I can say is, if you've got an idea or a suggestion, voice it. The more contributions, the fast the project moves.


---Brett.