> Hi there, this is a wonderful idea, well thought out and decently
> explained. I had a few questions off the top of my head:
>
> Given that this is an open source community, how
> private / NDA driven would the prototype need to be?
No privacy is needed, nor would I require an NDA -- if someone wanted to
do all this in the open, around a game of Poker, than that's good enough
for me. My "intellectual property" is the game, imagery, and rules that
I'd build on top of the code - the framework I describe, however, is
intended to be generic enough as to apply to any turn-based card game.
> Since we're talking web, I assume you're not
> opposed to polling the server for updates?
Nope, not opposed. I imagine a number of polling events take place:
* once a second for the chat application.
* once before a player completes a turn
("is this a valid played card"?)
* once after a player completes a turn ("let's update the play
area with the effects of the card just played").
* once after a player begins a turn (to "draw" a card).
I'm not adverse to additional polling besides the above, but we could
probably piggyback event-checking off the chat application too.
Describing the above reminded me of another thing I need:
* The server needs to be able to send back a list of UI actions
when a turn begins. These UI actions would move cards around,
place them in a certain area, or what have you. Something
along the lines of "Ah, I see. Player 1 played that card.
I need to send Player 2's third and fourth card to the
discard pile now".
I imagine, pie-in-the-sky like, that the above functionality would also
let me code an AI entirely on the server, for players to play against. I
have no illusions of grandeur, and have run up against many games that
fail because there's never anyone on at the same time to play against.
> Is there any concern the developer should have
> for any back end structuring at all?
Nope, not really. My particular backend will be PHP and Drupal (which,
as I'm sure some folks now, is angling to include jQuery 1.0 in its
forthcoming release, which feature freezes on Sept. 1st). My ultimate
desire would be to release the framework as a GPL'd Drupal module, with
my own game as its flagship implementation.
Certainly, I wouldn't be insanely happy about 20k worth of data being
sent back and forth every poll, but the real thing I need with this
project is the jQuery stuff hammered out and explained. If the provided
backend is nothing more than a glued together piece of crap that barely
works, that's alright - I can rewrite backends. I can't yet "parse" and
rewrite jQuery code.
> Does this system need to operate with JS turned off?
No. This will be treated in the same mentality of a Flash game - "you
must have Flash 8" vs. "you must have Javascript enabled, and not be
using Netscape 4. Weirdo."
> How accessible of a solution are you looking for?
"accessible" is ill-defined, so:
* It should work in every browser that jQuery works.
* I'm not concerned about US 508 or disabled people.
> Is there a preferred server language / database that
> portions of this should be written in?
See above, but ultimately, no. If you say "yeah, I wrote this on WinXP
with .NET [1]. Here's the code - it needs to spit out this bit of XML
for whenever a player begins a turn", I can reproduce that natively in
Drupal, PHP, and MySQL. But what I can't do is "yeah, I wrote this all
in Dojo. Just convert to jQuery, and you're all set."
Ideally, the backend would be PHP and some sort of SQL. But again, just
to stress, the backend should have the least priority -- it doesn't need
to be pretty or functional or perfectly designed. The crap I don't know
how to do is jQuery, DOM, and AJAX - I can learn quickly from existing
code that does what I want, but starting from scratch, I just don't have
the time for it.
[1] Though, if you DID do this, I'd need to have you host the
demo to show it off to me - I have no Windows machines.
--
Morbus Iff ( i've got the creme filling )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
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