Potentially interested in helping out

Anything related or not related to the project.
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Tom

Potentially interested in helping out

Post by Tom »

Hi folks,

I stumbled across this project and got interested. I love these strategy games, although I have not played Imperialism (came out when I was a poor Ph.D. student with no spare time...)

I am a programmer, currently working for a company that produces a commercial package for technical documentation (server/client architecture in Java). I am thinking about branching out into the games trade and am looking for projects that interest me and that I can add to my future portfolio. In the meantime I enjoy coding and gaming so it would be the perfect hobby project to join in.

Let me know if you need any help, I can't promise buckets of time right now, I could do some tasks at a time. If it works out I could free more time for it.

Regards /Tom
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Trilarion
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Re: Potentially interested in helping out

Post by Trilarion »

Hi Tom,

Yes sure we can use any help. Especially since your expertise is with Java and server/client things. I wired some dialogs together, mostly to have something to show. In the last time I evaluated some network communication libraries. Initially I was going for netty and protocol buffers to send messages, but I found it much much more overhead and even a bit less useful for me than kryonet including its own serialization of some simple objects. I would like to go for a thin client and an event driven framework and I have little experience of how to optimnally handling the messages that will go forth and back. I want to avoid a monster loop but want to have some hierachy and chains and state models to keep complexity as low as possible.

I would advice you to register at this forum, then give comments on the game as it is planned (see GameSpecifications) or just general comments what you think strategy games like this need to have or shouldn't have at all. Also I would like your opinion about the code or especially what you think the network code should do or shouldn't do. Or you just tell me which part you would like to work on and we make a task out of it (user interface, sound, network, storage, AI, ...).

Some places to check out:
Actual game specification: http://imperialism-remake.googlecode.co ... ations.odt
Actual source code: http://code.google.com/p/imperialism-re ... unk%2Fmain
I should update the "getting started" in the next days to reflect all recent changes.

See you
Tril
tallkrogen
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Re: Potentially interested in helping out

Post by tallkrogen »

Cool. I'll check out the specs discussions and try to inject some constructive comments.

Since the game is turn based then there is no need to have a heavy-weight server side. As long as the server can take each individual transaction synchronously. Will the server need to push? Think of a case where a PvP game where one player takes a long time to respond - very frustrating for the other(s). I guess you have some ideas on this already so I'll check the game spec.

One Java server I've looked at that is very light-weight is kryonet. In my work we use Tomcat with a servelet interface to MySQL (or in some cases MS-SQL or Orcale). That of course is way too much overhead for this project :)

/Tom
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Trilarion
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Re: Potentially interested in helping out

Post by Trilarion »

Yes, you're right. Heavy server-side traffic is not expected and we don't need to care about real time but I've seen in another strategy game project that inefficient network transfers (moving a unit and asking the server on every new tile position if its okay to move) can have an impact. I guess apart from that only disconnections need to be taken into account (and repaired automatically).

Kryonet it is now. It mostly does everything we need under the cover. I'm always a bit hesitant about using big enterprise libraries because of the overhead they carry. Of course I like professional solutions but I like them even more the leaner they are. Anyway, just feel free to give your opinion on anything you want. :)
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Trilarion
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Getting Started updated and simplified

Post by Trilarion »

I updated the Getting Started, so if you want to know more about the code you should check there.
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Trilarion
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Post by Trilarion »

Btw. getting started is now just the github main page. JIRA is still a possibility but only for myself developing it is definitely overkill. I want to see more input from others before I take the time to setup and learn to use something like JIRA.
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