Planet SoC

I’ve posted a new Windows build, and am currently trying to get the client to work fully with the python-ogre deb on Ubuntu. As expected, getting python-ogre to work on Mac is quite a chore, I’m almost there, got everything compiled but running the demos gives me a “wrapper” error, and I’ll probably have to understand how the code generation in python-ogre works to figure it out.

Well, contrary to how my current weekly post-count must look, I am still alive. Where I last left off I had just finished up the official part of my work on thousand parsec. Since then I travelled a few times, to a family member’s cabin in Gimli, MB, and into Winnipeg while my wife did some professional development for work.

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:

Hehe, it was a close one! I wasn’t even sure myself, but at the end I made it… just narrowly squeezed in. It was a really interesting experience to code 1k lines or so in the last couple of days, then debug, playtest, debug some more, and finally tidy it up. Intense!! There’s nothing like the smell of burning asphalt in the morning…

On a more technical note, here’s how it’s looking right now:
1) A working client, with game-world representation of both RFTS and Risk.
2) Several semi-working algorithms to play RFTS.
3) A fully functional Risk bot, which successfully plays the game, with some moderately complex control-flow, and decision making algorithms.
4) A “genetic” framework, which reads, writes, and decodes “genome” files, which specify bot behavior.

Here’s what’s missing:

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 is the last week of GSOC, the date in which our evaluations begin is tomorrow. It’s been a pretty short and exciting trip, sometimes I’m still amazed that I have the chance to work on this at all. On to the additions!

A checkbox for “saving details” was added to the login screen. When checked, the username, password, last server connected to and some other preferences are saved in the user’s home directory, so that reinstalling the client will not affect the preferences. The password text is masked now, and saved to disk in hexadecimal format. Pretty primitive, but the idea is just to prevent casual lookers from getting the password.

Countdown? Cut? Straw? Fantasy? You fill it in.

So, it seems I missed a week. Sorry. I don’t think it really makes a difference now, there’s only two days left anyway. What is the state? Well, I have a working AI for the Risk ruleset. It’s a bit mediocre, but it will provide some opposition. I might tweak it a bit the next few hours, but I’m mostly done with it.

Let’s see what it does… It will expand into neutral territory, it will move its troops to protect the borders of the empire, reinforce where needed and it will attack without hesitation. The last one is a bit of a problem, as it doesn’t really pick its target really well. I might take another look at.

Well things have finally come to an end. As my time with GSoC wraps up I look back and realize how quickly the summer came to an end, and how much fun I had. After my short trip out of province to visit family and friends I arrived home yesterday to finish off the last of my emails and correspondences. Today I exported my screencasts in a higher resolution for the TP media server, and got a few last minute bugs resolved. While I won’t quit working on Risk I am drawing the line between GSoC and personal work today.

This Week:

This week’s big accomplishment was completing the wizard. From initially getting it to work to a fully functional wizard only took two (long) days of hacking, thanks to good preparation everywhere else.

I also improved the control scripts and XML definitions. The server and ruleset stuff implemented so far works well.

Big sigh of relief. Looks like I covered everything I set out to. While there are undoubtedly some rough edges, given how the slow progress of early August pushed me almost right up to the deadline, there are no major gaps.

From Here On Out: