Daily Work

To give people an idea of what's going on every day I have decided to write what I am working on daily as I work on it. I will keep my posts as replies each day in this topic.

Wednesday - 2 Sep 09

Worked on adding cards to games. I have made it so cards will be added after each territory gaining round however turning in cards is still unavailable. So when I program that in I will upload it and allow people to use cards.

I am also working on a new word/idea for how cards work, separating our game from the competition (online and offline).

The forums/framework I use has an admin panel, however I am not satisfied with it. I will make it so each user group (mods, admins, map creators, news writers, etc.) will have their own usergroup panel in which they can perform their duties, all built into the site and custom made. So I have been considering how I want this to look so it will be nice and clean.

I went ahead and blocked the sitemap link in the footer until the site is in beta.

Thursday - 3 Sep 09

I worked more on the cards. I have made it so that the cards can be turned in and receive the bonuses in your reinforcements, however the cards don't get taken away from you when you turn them in. So now all that's left for the cards functionality is taking them away when you turn them in and keeping cards from being re-used before the deck is finished.

I also did some work on the end game. So now when you end a game it records your wins, losses, total games as well as your tally.

Tally is the # you have against any given foe. Let's say I play against Bob and Bob loses.

Our tally would then be:
Me vs Bob = 1

If bob beat me after that our tally would be:
Me vs Bob = 0

Then if he beat me again it would be:
Bob vs Me = 1

In the meantime it will also be tracking the total amount of games played between Me and Bob. So there will be a lot of individual battles between 2 users trying to get above the other user. Soon I will work on the page that displays these stats. For today I just fixed it so that the stats show.

As well I have made it so when you win/lose a game it shows up in your profiles recent history as "so and so won/lost such and such game."

Friday - 4 Sep 09

Today I haven't uploaded any of the work I accomplished, however I fixed the bug on the games list page where every game shows the same number of current players. Now it shows the real amount of players already joined in the game.

I also fixed the 4+ person games so that it allows more than 3 people to join. However I found there is a bug in the way it divides the territories, so in a 4 person game out of 42 territories 1 will be neutral and 1 person will have 11 territories, I will fix this tomorrow.

As well I made it so when someone joins the game it auto refreshes the players list without requiring you to reload the page.

Now though I am going to bed early to get an early start on tomorrow, so I can get a ton of work done.

Sunday - 6 Sep 09

Yesterday ended up being a more complicated day than expected and I wasn't able to get any work done. Today I plan on fixing that.

I fixed a bug so that now the map loads without refreshing the page after the last player joins the game. I also have uploaded all of the changes from Friday.

I put in a fresher copy of the framework I am using, this hopefully will fix forum bugs such as random closed threads.

- GAME FIXES -

• Games with 4+ players were dividing territories unequally, now they divide equally.
  

- FORUM FIXES -

• Reply box on threads that were closed was still showing, now when a thread is closed the reply box does not show.
  

I also worked more on the cards, I should be able to upload them tomorrow if I have time to finish them up.

Monday - 8 Sep 09

Worked on Cards and Reinforcements. Cards is finished however I will wait until chained and unlimited reinforcement types are finished before I upload it.

Was sick yesterday so no work done, feeling a little better today.

Ugh... well I did a huge amount of work. I had a red bull and stayed up late working on it. I was working on chained reinforcements and there was I was running into a problem with the current way I programmed things, so I renamed/reorganized things and thought I wrapped up all the lose ends, after uploading and trying to play a test game I realize I was wrong.

Games cannot be started right now due to a major bug.

A rundown of the changes that I made that will be available when I fix the bug. I worked out the code a bit making it easier for me to add things to it. As well the updates will include:

• Already taken colors are no longer listed as an option when joining a game
  
• Flat-Rate/Escalating Cards
  
• Unlimited/Chained Reinforcement types
  

Tomorrow when I have more time I will go through and play a few test games on my computer and work out this major bug and any other minor bugs that may have been created due to my new back-end.

I deleted all previous games to fit the new system of how we store player colors and records

Today I went through and fixed all the bugs, the game is now working completely fine. I also added somethings

I fixed a bug so that now when you make an error on the registration form it shows you the error rather then just sending you back to the registration page without any reason.

I also added a time left countdown in the top left corner of the play page so you can watch as your time remaining goes down, this will be useful for speed games. After the time runs out it automatically updates the page data without refresh.

Tomorrow perhaps I will start working on auto reloading the page so that a refresh is never required.

Friday - 11 Sep 09

I stayed up late working on the Thailand map. I also cleaned up some of the code so there are less database requests, this should make the game slightly faster.

I will upload this stuff tomorrow though including the countdown timer for time remaining. I want to wait until everyone is asleep so I don't mess up anyone's games as I upload file by file.

Saturday - 12 Sep 09

I worked on the Administration and Cartography Panels. Trying to get the Cartography panel finished, then I will be finishing the Thailand map and start work on creating other new maps.

Monday - 14 Sep 09

I got the day off from work so I worked more on the Cartography Panel. The panel is nearly complete, when it is I will be uploading it. I have a new way for display the troop counts on the territories:

http://www.dominating12.com/new-number-idea1.jpg

This will slightly increase the speed for loading a page, because the numbers are text, so the only image you load is the circle, rather than a new image for each color/number.

Tomorrow I have the day off from work so I should be able to finish the Cartography panel and hopefully very shortly after that I will have the Large/Small map views.

When I finish the panel I will be adding the Thailand map as an option of games to play and I will be working to make the maps (territory numbers) clickable so people don't have to scroll down constantly to make an assault.

Tuesday - 15 Sep 09

I finished the Cartography Panel so I can now add maps using it.

I have a new way of displaying the troops, I have uploaded the new way, feed back would be great.

All changes I have made up until now have been uploaded.

Wednesday - 16 Sep 09

I use a framework/forum system that I fully understand and was given from a friend. The way he does the messaging though is not messages but rather Private Threads. I find it uncomfortable to use as a replacement for messages.

So today I spent the day trying to spruce up his code to make it more comfortable to use and easy on the eyes. Though after wasting my day I realized it would be better just to recode in a whole new messaging system... So this is what I will be doing.

So today was wasted. Tomorrow I plan on working on the "my games" page separating Active from Pending and Historic. Perhaps even throw up the Standings page in the profile. I really need to get in gear on this site. It's hard to plan out all the little details of each page.

eg. What should a messaging page have? I mean if you could build your messaging system however you wanted it, how would you build it? What links would you have? what colors go well with the site, where would things be located, would you have icons, how would you show new messages so they stand out, how would you show how many people can view a certain message, etc. etc.?

I suppose the Thailand map will be on hold for a bit. I also want to build in the ability to click troops on the map and set up an assault that way rather than scrolling down to the assault panel, however I don't know how to show the results and make it look good...

Quite a lot of planning to do.

For the message system, I'll throw something together in Photoshop to show you my idea.

Would you be building it completely from scratch, or will your code be based on a messaging system already in use on other sites?

Completely from scratch, completely new db etc. I will just be fitting it into the design of this forum.

I was thinking for the messaging system to use some ideas from google. Like when you have back and forths with people you end up getting:
RE:RE:RE:RE:RE: Hey
RE:RE:RE:RE: Hey
... like 10+ messages in your inbox

I plan to combine them all like google, so it just re-highlights the original message when there is a reply and brings that message back to the top of a list, kinda like a private thread.

This is just an idea, but I was thinking to use the graphics I used for the Recent Activity on the profile page and show new messages in that, and then have a box below it to show all the previous messages, and put a link in the top right corner for "new message" and "mark all as read".

I don't know if that would fit everything, what other options people might want for their messaging.

My school work is taking up quite a bit of my time tonight. I'll get my messaging ideas worked out sometime tomorrow.