Hey guys :)
Once again I have been working away at another lib before Pyweek ;)
This time I had a bit of difficulty (my grandpa got pneumonia) so I have been unable to document fully/release it.

PyMike93 was extremely nice, though, and finished the docs and is hosting it for me until I have a chance to get back.

The docs are a simple text file, and it really isn't very detailed, but I hope it passes, because I have zero time to work on it right now :(


If anyone has any questions then, feel free to ask, it should take no more than 5 minutes to explain any of the widgets or anything ;)

Cya Later everyone :)

Team HITHS has lost quite a few of our members this time around, and we currently need a 3d modeler.

Currently the team consists of 2 or 3 programmers, a musician, a designer, and one pixel artist.
But, for what we have planned, pixel art won't work for all of it :)

if you are interested you can email me at roebros (at) gmail (dot) com, and I can show you what we have planned :)

Well, we have random map/territory generation now :D
That was probably the second biggest question mark for us, behind networking :D

Right now we're going to try and get all the game-play stuff coded today so we can focus on networking, ai, music/sfx/gfx and polish the rest of the week ;)

And for those interested - maybe we can start a trend, anyone want to see what we're trying to make?:
http://code.google.com/p/hiths-pyweek6/wiki/MainIdea

Enjoy - cya later :)

We almost have something that resembles our goal now :D



Remind you of dicewars? :D

We are barely on schedule still :)

Today we added several players, and got graphics in place. We also added fighting between territories - but that needs to be limited to connected territories that are of different types ;) It also needs to be limited to turns.

Here you can see yellow and green are doing the best:


Tomorrow should see the rest of gameplay - like new units and stuff, and the start of multiplayer and ai :D

After seeing all the quality entries this time through - I'm truly amazed and glad to see how much the level of quality has increased this time - Keep up the good work everyone :D

Our game is probably at 40% done now.
Late last night and now this morning I got the interactions in, you fight neighboring territories or transfer your own units around now.
Also needed are for capitols to generate new units, and for supply centers to be added.

Needs to be converted to turn-based and such - but we're getting there.

The rest of the day will be spent on this and multiplayer - for me that is.
Markus is going to get a start on the ai hopefully.

Also we should be getting some new graphics and maybe some music - so this could be a very productive day :D

New screenie for you - Pink is winning:

Wowsa - so much to say, so little brain-power to say it :P

Today Markus, nihilocrat, OrenMyst and I were all hitting the game at the same time - more or less.
Which is cool.

We now have the battle engine complete - assuming we don't add captains or formation cards.
Selected territories are now highlighted.
Several nasty bugs were fixed.
But several more added :(
We have a game that Markus and I have both played several times through - and it is fun :D :D
We have music and some not place-holder-art done :D
You gain troops elsewhere besides capitols - based on your number of connected territories.
You can zoom in and out - though we need to get the sprites to scale along with that ;)
You can win without crashing.

I was also planning on starting and maybe finishing the multi-player tonight - but after looking at that list I'm happy enough with our progress:D
Tomorrow *must* see the multiplayer thoguh - or we are in deep crud and will have to abandon that idea!

New screenie - slightly out-dated - all place-holders ;)
Green Attacking Pink ;)


And for the first time ever we have a really enjoyable pyweek game :D
I think this is the first time I've ever taken time away from development to actually play a game - and this is only the half-way mark :D

I'm really disliking this right now.
I remember before the update to pygame 1.8 everything was perfect now though it is static on all our comps :(

At first I thought this was due to our game running at < 30 fps, ~40 with psyco.
But, after only one simple optimization we're getting 150+ fps right now - and the music is worse than ever!

does anyone know the "magic numbers" needed for pygame.mixer.pre_init for each platform?
I got it at least bearable - but not perfect on my winXP - but it isn't any better on linux and not tested on mac yet at all :(

Uggh - and I wanted to do multiplayer today - not spend time fixing stupid bugs! :/ Oh well.

Well - yesterday was another very productive day.
I wrote a multiplayer server/client - that works :D, and it only took probably 7-8 hours :)
It uses just sockets, and the game will have a lobby :D

I also shot about 3 hours trying to fix a bug in pygame.mixer that was giving all of us static from our music - which didn't work at all - so we're going to allow players to turn music/sound off if it is yucky for them.

Markus worked on the battles to make the images cleaner and stuff.

New screenie:

Today we need to integrate the multiplayer into the game,
write the ai,
add new gui and images,
make a multiplayer lobby, err wrap it ;)
Clean up gui - and add prompt windows for actions like attacking and movement,
BUG FIXES!!!!

Technically - we are on schedule right now - how, I don't know really - but it has gotten steadily more difficult to keep on schedule here - we fell back one day in the middle - but luckily scheduled some catch-up time in that area - so we are back on! :D

Not sure if we'll be able to stay on today - but we're going all night here to try it :P

24 hours - and I'm planning a 10 hour stint - 'til 4am :(
I had to go into work a little earlier than I was hoping - due to people callig in sick all over the place - so, cumulatively, I figure we lost about 10 hours coding time >:(

Now we get to see if we still are good at crunch time - or if our network stuff is too buggy and destroys us - ugg!

Well - here I was getting all fired up about getting the multiplayer in the game - and we come to realize that it totally is not working!

Basically - because we did this in sockets - a lot of the functionality is going to be difficult to do - and we just don't have the time.

DUN DUN DUN...

Markus is now going to try to write a server/client in twisted in a couple of hours - and then we're going to have to hack like mad to try and get the game fit to it :D

If this doesn't pan out we're just going to have a nice ai and some hotseat.

Wish us luck ;)

Well, I just committed our new ai to the game :D
And it only took about 2 hours - yay!

Now it is just how much ui and how many bugs we can squash, and whether Markus can finish the multiplayer :P

New screenie for you - blue beat me :(

We weren't going to do it - but we needed the extra time :P

fca2c1f11d5256c00f2f36b8941d9ad9

Well - we had the same error doing our md5 hash as so many others have - so we're still waiting for an official upload.

Pending that - you can try out the game from our googlecode page:
http://code.google.com/p/hiths-pyweek6/downloads/list

Also - the territory/tile selection is off by one tile - so either play realizing this - which isn't too bad - just kinda weird, or change line 391 in lib/world.py to:
p = p[0] - x[0], p[1] - x[1] + self.tile_size[1]

Also - it appears possible to make the game crash - but this happened only once - so if it does hit you - please give us the traceback - and then play again ;)

Have fun - and let us know what you think please :)

Richard was very helpful in getting our game finally uploaded :D YAY!

There is a slight bug in territory selecting - and one random crash - read more here:
http://pyweek.org/d/1661/

Just letting you know - the "last post" part of the site appears to be messed up again :(
ie - some posts are saying the last post was the first post - instead of the last post....

not sure why this would be - just letting you know ;)

What on earth? These have to be the weirdest rating I have ever seen.
Here follows a little rant, and some responses to comments:

With more entrants than ever - we only had 28 respondents?

This was our best game *ever* - yet we got pretty close to our worst score ever - approximately equal to our last entry which had zero game-play.

We had zero DQ's or DNW's - yet a sizable amount of our responses were 1/1/1 or "I did not understand the game", and "where were the robots?"... yet there were no DQ's/DNW's given!?!?

And our ratings were a huge roller coaster - we were given either a great score, or a really low one, but only a couple that were average from our respondents - and an awful lot of them were like "it's just a risk clone..." - so, why did you rank it so low for being a certain genre (it is not risk, and was actually inspired by a different game) - did you do that for all the platformers, or the rpgs, or...?

Also, it seems that several of the games got a lot of 1/1/1's with no DNW/DQ, but the top games only got those (if at all) with a DNW, so it didn't count to there score... I assume this the judging irregularity richard mentioned?

Some comment weirdness:
"It had a very intuitive control interface, and it was a joy to play" vs. "Couldn't figure out how to play":
First, I realize that most people don't like to read instruction screens before playing - but once you realized you didn't get it - couldn't you have read the ReadMe (which points to the ingame instruction screens)?

And now a response to most of the comments, or at least their general meanings:

"too long of load time made it unplayable":
Yes, we were planning on optimizing the map generation - but it isn't that bad - some of the other games were this way too, and I think the addition of random maps outweighs the long load time...

"Graphics needed work":
Which ones in particular? The tiles were planned that way from the beginning - and the units were done by DiamondGFX at the last minute, and are really nice.
The rest - yes, they could use some work.

"It is not really related to Robot":
How so? Did you look at the title, read the instructions or look at the units in-game? The game is about robot armies duking it out - not very innovative for the theme, perhaps, but definitely there...

"SFX for every battle were too long":
Yeah - those can get annoying, I was planning on shortening them to be better, and not wait at all if they were disabled, but no time :(

"Pretty good, really. Would be nice to be able to see a count of how many units are in each area - sometimes it's hard to count the robots. Could use some tweaking, and some prettying-up. Use pyglet and you could have the window dynamically resizable, which would've been nice. Not sure why there's such a huge chunk of the bottom bit taken over by black.":
The count of bots would have been nice - I never considered this really, thx :)
Tweaking? Always :)
Prettying up? Not sure where - the gui could have been nicer, and a few things laid out better, but if you mean the GFX style (except for the background ;) ), that was intentional.
You can make the windows dynamically resizable in pygame too - but that would have been unnecessary IMHO, jut change the settings in your options menu.
The big black area was going to hold a lot more gui elements when we added multiplayer - like a chatbox and stuff.

"I couldn't zoom because I don't have a scroll wheel, which made it more awkward to play that it should have been.":
Dang! I forgot about that, sorry. Will fix shortly ;)

"Cool ai":
Thanks, I'm really surprised how well it worked too.
We were planning that Markus would handle this - since he is really good at it, and I would do multiplayer.
It ended up opposite ;)
In the end, this ai was my first real one, and took only about 3 hours to do so I am very pleased :)

"Like TEG...":
Never played - but it looks like just a clone of Risk - which this is not - some of the more advanced features were cut to save time - which did make it look closer, it isn't actually IMO.

"It would be nice to be able to move 'some' but not all troops":
This was planned - but after some consideration I decided that it might take away some of the interesting parts of the game - that and there was no time to implement the gui, ai or rules to fit this.
Will probably be in a later version though.

"Couldn't win because it would crash":
We have been trying to find this crash since before we released - no clue why it is crashing - could you give us a traceback?

"Will you work further on this?":
Absolutely :D


A few hints on game-play, for those having difficulty:
Read the instructions!
Guard you capitols and factories always
Try and grab other capitols/factories early
Play as several players, ie "players = 7", "ai = 5" or something
Wait for the map to load!!!

Other than that, thx again richard and everyone for a great pyweek.
The nice game we have now is more than worth the headaches from the site crashing, or the md5 uploading, or the weirdness in the ratings.

Cya all next time, and congrats to the winners :D