Planet SoC

Wow. I’ve been way too busy this past week. Classes started and the workload managed to pile on way too fast. I still haven’t even gotten some of my books. Thankfully, most of Dronesec was already done for the deadline on August 18. I’ve managed to do a couple of things in the short amounts of free time I had but not nearly as much as I would like. I managed to get tpserver-py on windows to work which I hope to put on a full How-To article on the TP wiki tonight or tomorrow if time permits.

I used epydoc on tpserver-py and I found that I need to find a more standard format for the docstrings and to fill it out for a lot more documentation. I’ll be slowly working on that this week as my time permits. I do however think that finding a good standard form for the docstrings would be a good idea to make sure that at least most of the information needed is there.

Its the second to last week and most of the touch ups and documentation are on their way. Unfortunately, classes began this week and it has kept me much busier than I hoped. However, dronesec and tpserver-py are both coming along nicely and windows operability has been achieved!

This week I:

Its been both a fun and frustrating week.

I got tpserver to work on windows using Cygwin. It took a while to figure and I haven’t tested it fully but at least the server will run. I’ll have to write up some simple instructions to setting up the server.

It wasn’t a simple process so I’ll draw up an initial guide and reinstall it to see how it works.

Now I have to find someone with a Mac.

Its been a little busy around here lately with moving into the new house and then helping my roomates move in that I almost forgot about my weekly report!

This week I’ve been trying to make Dronesec more user friendly.

Got a game going last night: A couple of bugs cropped up.

Some feedback:

• It seems that in the windows version of tpclient-pywx. If someone moves the mouse towards the star map the main window will come into focus. This issue came up when one of the players was trying to see the designs.
• Some problems with the cache. The universe is downloaded but the star map and the system tree still contain the same information.
  I think it might be an issue mostly with caching.
• I believe I need to fix my reparenting as some issues are occurring when dealing with overlords and drones.
• On windows tpclient-pywx, the starmap completely disappeared after deleting a cache to update the map. Map reappeared on the next turn.
• At one point: One of the players got a Network Error 38. Fixed by deleting cache.

So I tried to playtest tonight. Unfortunately the University wireless is baaaaaaaad. I think I might be between wireless connections and thus the connection is going a little haywire leaving the games disconnected every other 10 seconds.

So I guess Tomorrow I will be searching for good a good spot to get my wireless connection going hopefully then I can get an actual game going. Fingers are crossed.

Tonight I hope to convince some friends to playtest Dronesec. Hopefully It’ll be fun and give me some good feedback.

I’ve made a short instruction manual for dummies which I might transfer over to the wiki.

I think I’m going to be focusing more on trying to make Dronesec more user-friendly and perhaps adding designs for researches so those are also readily available.

Its been an overall busy week. I had to move into a new house just days after arriving back from Puerto Rico.

In the short time since then I’ve done at least some of my more “coding” based work.

I’ve been working on how to make maps load using an xml file. I need a very simple format containing every planet’s name, position, size and if its a possible home planet.

Its not a lot of information I need to hold nor is it very complicated.

All I want to do is grab some information so I can then build a map of planets and systems. It shouldn’t be a big problem something quick were I can just assign values for the things I want.

Using CSV getting the information is fast and simple. XML, is a whole different story.
Lets take a look at why:
This is the code to get all the items in a line of a csv file:

for row in csvfile:
do stuff with the row

or for each column in every row:

for name, x, y, z in csvfile:
do stuff with name, x, y and z

I’ve been working on how to make maps load using an xml file. I need a very simple format containing every planet’s name, position, size and if its a possible home planet.

Its not a lot of information I need to hold nor is it very complicated.

All I want to do is grab some information so I can then build a map of planets and systems. It shouldn’t be a big problem something quick were I can just assign values for the things I want.

Using CSV getting the information is fast and simple. XML, is a whole different story.
Lets take a look at why:
This is the code to get all the items in a line of a csv file:

for row in csvfile:
   do stuff with the row

or for each column in every row:

for name, x, y, z in csvfile:
    do stuff with name, x, y and z

Not much was done this week as I was kept busy back home in Puerto Rico for some 5 days. However some work was done:

Note: As of writing this the gitweb appears to be missing the dronesec branch so no links can be provided right now. ec365732248c0682cb74262953f2a524

This/Next Week:

Not much was done this week as I was kept busy back home in Puerto Rico for some 5 days. However some work was done:

EDIT: Added links to from the gitweb

Dronesec is ready for Action!
The basics of researching has been fully implemented.

There are 4 types of research

SQLAlchemy has won. Today I spent a good portion of my mental cycles trying to figure out something which I am now convinced I was not supposed to do.

One of the SQL Columns if of the PickleType. It contains a list. I searched high and low to find out if I could do a select statement to find all records in which X element was in that list. This did not go as planned.

I’m trying to install tpclient-pyogre but the installation for python-ogre has been troublesome lately. The installation instructions in their wiki don’t seem to be up-to-date and I keep getting an error with the boost library(oddly enough, boost and most python libraries dealing with are already installed on my box.)
If I remember correctly it had something to do with bjam.

I’ve been concentrating more on dronesec though so I haven’t been able to devote much time to it. Which reminds me, I should probably update the wiki to include all the new changes I’ve made to Dronesec in the past couple of weeks.

On another note, the overall installation of python-ogre is a very time consuming process.

This week, I fixed everything up to use the SQL database and made sure that everything else was working correctly with I needed to do.
I made 3 Database Objects.

• Drone - Which holds all the statistical information for each drone.

I learned a lot about Python and tpserver-py this week. Mostly about shelves and some of the inner workings of the SQL system in tpserver-py.

I learned a lot about Python and tpserver-py this week. Mostly about shelves and some of the inner workings of the SQL system in tpserver-py.

Today, I have found the answers to my questions. 5627aabc95b6c0783a379e2f963108c7

And the answer is… shelve.

With shelve, I can create my own database for dronesec. Since shelve works like pickle, I can pickle each separate instance for each game into a “master controller” (which I have named Jarvis). It doesn’t end there though. The master controller can even hold different libraries for drones and researches per game.