RE: [Rails-devel] RE: First goal?

[Erik V. <eri...@hc...>]

 
> >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've little experience in implementing user interfaces, 
most of my work has always been on the back-end side (servers etc.).
User-friendliness I can judge. But I've never done anything with Swing,
Postscript, graphical artwork etc. Just a bit of Java AWT 8 years ago,
and quite some HTML/Javascript (with Perl CGI's and Java servlets) later on
(I'm currently doing a project in plain old C).
 
> 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.

Yes, I have 1830PC and I agree with your view.

> 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.

And the low resolution it was apparently designed for.

> 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.

We could put different views (map, market, company view etc.)
in different windows or panes, so that users can move and resize.

No grand ideas yet, sorry. I would tend to start bottom-up,
creating prototypes that show part of the functionality and 
later fit things together. All using the same base classes, of course.

For instance, I could try to work out the Stock market, building upon
some of your classes and the StockPrice I sent you yesterday,
to create a servlet that would display the stock market,
with 4 buttons per company for the market-related movements:
PayOut (right/up), Withhold (left/down), SoldOut(up), Sell(down)
to let the tokens move over the display. 
Output would be HTML initially.
This would be little more than a demo, but in the background we would get
a number of classes that can be reused for the final UI machine
(which I don't envision yet), and a stockmarket definition file
(XML if we standardise on that). And then on to something else.

Is that a reasonable approach?

Erik.