Planet SoC

This was the final week of GSoC. I was out of town for most of the week with limited internet access, so I don’t have a ton of updates. I spent the week cleaning up and commenting code. I also did some more testing as I went.

Even though GSoC is ending, I plan to continue to test the game and I may add some new features too. Overall, I had a great time coding this summer. Hopefully I made a worthwhile contribution to TP!

This week I worked on testing and documentation. I completely revamped the wiki page for Tigris and Euphrates into a much shorter and clearer walkthrough of the rules with screenshots. I removed a few of the sections in the wiki because I felt that they were excessive and didn’t really help the reader understand the game.

This week I completed the combat turn. This means that TaE is now fully playable from start to finish. All the features that were originally planned at the beginning of the summer are now implemented.

This week I completed the combat turn. This means that TaE is now fully playable from start to finish. All the features that were originally planned at the beginning of the summer are now implemented.

Now that combat is implemented into TaE, I’m going to run through the rules behind it and what it looks like both in TP and on the physical board.

First off, there are two different types of combat in TaE: Internal and External.

Internal combat is when there are two or more leaders of the same type in a single region, as shown below:

Physical Board

This week I worked on getting the combat turn system implemented. I planned to have a fully playable version of the game done today, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to meet that goal. I ran into several bugs as I worked on the combat turn which slowed my work. A couple of these bugs were in previously written code but just didn’t surface until I had written the combat code. The other thing that slowed down my progress was the time it took to setup each combat test case. I had to go through a couple turns of the game just to get to the point where I could test out each new feature. This caused significant slowdowns when hunting down a segfault.

I started off this week by taking a look at the TaE wiki page. I wrote up a getting started guide for people who want to try out TaE. I’ll be making improvements to both pages soon.

I then began planning everything out for the second half of the summer. I think the comparison photos between the actual board and it’s implementation went well so I will continue to post those as the project continues. I will incorporate these photos into the wiki page and make sure that anyone who wants to play the game needs to only visit the wiki to get all the info they need.

The Board:
Here is a picture of the physical board from the game this ruleset is based off of (click on the pictures for a larger view):

The board is composed of 3 different spaces: blank tiles, river tiles, and artifact tiles (marked by the winged creatures).

Here are a couple screenshots of the board in thousand parsec:

This week I focused on getting all my goals completed for the midterm evaluations. I added a restriction to the move order which I had forgotten before: leaders can only be moved to star systems which border a scientist colony.

This week I got the turn structure finalized by processing orders one player at a time and rotating that order each turn. You can read more about my reasoning to do this in this blog post. I also fixed a couple bugs which arose from processing orders in this way.

I spent this week working on my goals for the midterm. I implemented an algorithm which sorts all the orders by player (this will be used to implement the ordered turn system next week). I used the region system created last week to add code which finds a specific leader in a given region. This allowed me to implement the code which adds points to a player’s score.

I spent this week working on my goals for the midterm. I implemented an algorithm which sorts all the orders by player (this will be used to implement the ordered turn system next week). I used the region system created last week to add code which finds a specific leader in a given region. This allowed me to implement the code which adds points to a player’s score.

This week I did a lot of small behind the scenes stuff which helped to develop the rules for the game, but they didn’t make much of an observable difference to the player.

This week I did a lot of small behind the scenes stuff which helped to develop the rules for the game, but they didn’t make much of an observable difference to the player.

As the GSoC midterm approaches, I’ve decided on a few goals to attain by midterm. In general, I would like to have a playable demonstration of the non-combat parts of the game. So the goal is for the player to be able to see and interact with the board and their fleets and see the expected result except where combat would occur. To accomplish this, I need to complete the following things before midterm:

• finish up the orders
• implement scoring
• implement end-game conditions (although they probably wont be reached without combat)
• make sure orders are processed in the correct order (see: http://nuleren.blogspot.com/2008/05/thoughts-on-simultaneous-turns.html)

As the GSoC midterm approaches, I’ve decided on a few goals to attain by midterm. In general, I would like to have a playable demonstration of the non-combat parts of the game. So the goal is for the player to be able to see and interact with the board and their fleets and see the expected result except where combat would occur. To accomplish this, I need to complete the following things before midterm:

• finish up the orders
• implement scoring
• implement end-game conditions (although they probably wont be reached without combat)
• make sure orders are processed in the correct order (see: http://nuleren.blogspot.com/2008/05/thoughts-on-simultaneous-turns.html)

This week I began work on orders and the turn sequence. I developed a very simple turn sequence to simply perform the orders in the order queue. This was mostly to test out the orders. I implemented the first version of three orders:

This week I began work on orders and the turn sequence. I developed a very simple turn sequence to simply perform the orders in the order queue. This was mostly to test out the orders. I implemented the first version of three orders:

This week I focused on ships and fleets.

This week I focused on ships and fleets.