Hi!

Putting aside the issue of the web upload being uncooperative, there was something else, I thought of.

Right now, if a screenshot is uploaded, a thumb nail is automatically shown in the Entry Listing.

Now, it would be really interesting to have the system also mark any entries with a small icon or something, which have something else uploaded, something that is not a screenshot.

The intent is to make it easier to find those entries that have already uploaded (preview) versions of their game.

Well, that is just an idea I had.

Deathworks

I've just finished Twisted Life 0.5 and it's available for download.

Ok, it's still clearly a board game :-)

Some things I've done:

• Implement side-effect-free game state -- needed for AI to be added later. The code is quite unreadable. Anyone have any experience with lisp or haskell bindings for Python?
• Draw the board (procedurally) and pieces in wireframe. This obviously won't be the final look, but you gotta love the moire-woodgrain effect :-)
• Drag/drop the board pieces and twist the rings around, which updates the game state. Yay!

Committing myself to a set of rules is the next step, and writing the minimax.

Everyone, just use the upload script provided with skellington and you'll be able to upload like I did. Until richard fixes the web form.

"What might be up there?" thought the Allefant.
And the truth is, a crash - as the twisting of the level causes a singularity (division by zero) when the distance to the center gets 0 :P

I spent most of yesterday in Blender, even if all I did was the "up" frame of the Allefant, but Blender insisted to mingle the two poses in strange ways :/ The wooden ball was much simpler to do.

Twisted was my least favorite theme, but after some thinking I came up with a game concept which fits the bill well enough and can hold my interest. It's quite experimental and it will be a challenge to see whether I can turn it into a fun game, but here goes.

I wanted to regale you with a screenshot of what I did so far, but the pyweek site wasn't cooperating (said I didn't put in the required file, but that was the screenshot itself!). I've uploaded it on my own server for now, and here it is:

It may be the screenshot isn't entirely obvious. :) The game is intended to be simulating the development of countries on a planet in a period of over hundreds of years. Country borders change over time.

We are decided to implement some type of remake of ancient game where you are falling through twisted tunnels.

First real day has come to a close and after something like 15 solid hours of work we've come up with our concept, have an easy way to generate levels, pretty graphics, and working code. Still a lot of gameplay to work on but things are looking good. Tomorrow we hope to be able to get some monsters added, more animations, and work on environment interaction a bit.

Hi!

Yeah, even though I felt a bit better, yesterday I was simply too tired to get far. In addition, I also ran into what I now remember to have been an issue back when I first met wxWindows as well, namely wxClientDC. Somehow I can't get these beasts to work.

Fortunately, in the end I was able to get cooperation out of wxPaintDC and even found a solution where its placement in the parent-child hierarchy wouldn't pose a problem (basically, my design requires it to run as a child of the main window, but all the interaction (= drawing) is actually done by changing children of the main window).

And I even figured out how to force 640x480 screen resolution (although setting the frequency doesn't seem to work properly for me). Oh well, at least I have true full screen now.

I have looked at Skellington. I will definitely not use its run.py example, because it doesn't seem to really give me control over where a file is opened within the relative tree.
Instead, I am using something along the following lines:

try:
    DW_Const_Root_Dictionary = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
except:
    DW_Const_Root_Directory = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__name__))
DW_Const_Code_Directory = os.path.join(DW_Const_Root_Directory,"code")


execfile(os.path.join(DW_Const_Code_Directory,"constants.py"))

Theoretically, that should give me the same portability as the Skellington package has (wxPython used a small function hidden away in their Main.py in order to handle the conversion, so it looked as if they didn't do it).

However, __name__ NameErrors also when I start things directly (^_^;; (everything worked fine when I pressed F5 while editing things in IDLE). I think, if I used "." instead of __name__, shouldn't that do the trick? I will have to test that once I get home.

Still, despite the various setbacks (and the fact that I am currently house-sitting over at my parents' place because they are expecting some furniture parts to be delivered this afternoon), I still believe I can make it.

With the main menu (at least graphically) working as planned, I have effectively tested all graphics related commands I need and keyboard controls are also working fine (while I will try to add pad control, in case of emergency, keyboard would be sufficient).

The next major task is mainly data management, data loading and data saving. The basic routines in Python are known to me, and my knowledge concerning them should be sufficient to handle things.

The only thing I am a bit worried about is whether to use 'b' mode or not. The manual says that the standard build of Python wouldn't require 'b' mode for text, handling any correctly and automatically converting them to Python's native format. Even if that wasn't the case, if readlines() was able to identify lines correctly, I should be fine for nearly all text data since I don't need to know what each line ends with (there is just one exception).

Otherwise, I hope that I can use walk in some way to fix things up (using it to read all files in normal mode and then write them back in b- mode or something like that).

Besides such portability questions (and the question if the MIT is completely sufficient a license and how to use it), the only difficult thing I will probably come across is putting text messages on the screen. There should be some wxPython classes and methods helping with that, but that may require some fine-tuning.
Well, I guess what Tuesday will be for :) :) :)

Ah, I wanted to share at least a screenshot of the main menu as it is now (graphics will be refined on Wednesday), but Pyweek wouldn't allow me to upload stuff from my parents' computer (could be their firewall; I tried doing things using Firefox and IE, but I always got an unclassified error and the program pointing out that the field 'file' (the one connected to the browse button) was required. Once I am back home, I will check whether things are as bad on the university computers.

Okay, the title of the game is not really subtle, but I think it is okay :) :) :)

Deathworks

Well, it's the start of Day 2 and time to get back to work. Unfortunately, one of my fellow team members is asleep on the sofa and the other two are nowhere to be found.