Category: Blog

Refactoring the Game Engine

I hoped to release version 0.1.1 of justCheckers end of last month. However, I soon realized why I temporarily stopped the project earlier on. Before I went on my hiatus from the project, I started to refactor the game engine to allow for more flexible rules: “flying” kings and other interesting variations on checkers. Unfortunately this proved more difficult then I previously expected. So I stopped.

Before I can release the next version I need to fix/implement the game engine. I might take a few short-cut liberties to speed up the process. Might being the keyword. So while I already re-licensed and updated the documentation, a non-working game engine holds back the next release.

Now Available in Mini!

Thats right, the justCheckers project is now in full swing. To make this possible, I cut down on the cruft related to the project. This will let me concentrate less on content management and project management, and more on coding. Most of the older content will stick around, but in a more compact form. I’ll still need some time to polish up the developer resources section of this site. After that I can concentrate on releasing version 0.1.1

Moving House

This has been a busy and productive day. Yesterday I set up the website. And today I am moving content from the old justCheckers wiki into this website. Most of the content on that side couldn’t be edited by non-developers anyways. So publishing everything under a Drupal site makes sense. One thing that amazes me, is the relative ease of creating and maintaining all this content. Yes, I’m a firm believer in coding. And for the longest time, I resisted the whole easy to publish trend. The code must be perfect. It must conform to standards. Cause with standards there is a glimmer of hope, that everything will look the way it is supposed to. But looking at Drupal… Well lets just say… If someone else went out of their way to maintain things, and make sure they work across all the browsers and rendering engines out there. Then I’m happy to use other people’s hard work for free. 🙂

You may have noticed a slight change of heart on my part. Yesterday I discontinued the web application that I mentioned earlier. The web application seemed like an easier way to distribute the game. However, refactoring the game into a JSP would require too much work. In the end, using a simple Web Start launcher script does the trick. People will be able try out the latest stable version of the application, right off the application. Actually one of the main reasons for buying hosting from GoDaddy.com was the availability of JSP hosting. But alas, plans change.

So I’ll be working towards moving all the content in the next little while. After that I will be looking at releasing version 0.1.1 sometime this month.