Holiday Schedule
I'll be gone for large parts of December 24-26th. I should be able to check the server now and again, but between travel and spending time with family, I doubt I'll be playing too much. Which is too bad because...
New Games
I've decided to more aggressively move games out onto the server. There's a pretty good number of games that I've coded up rules for, but haven't released on the actual server. There are a number of reasons for this. Sometimes, I'm dissatisfied with the state of the bots for a game. Sometimes, I don't have a decent enough UI put together (card games). Sometimes, the game is just kind of uninteresting (Tic Tac Toe).
Anyway, I've decided to push hard to get every game in the library out onto the server. A big part of this is the impending open source release of the library, and the goal of providing a client api for the server. Basically, if a game exists in the library, I want the server to support it.
This means games will start to appear on the server that are in a less complete state than our usual releases. The development process will be much more open in the future and part of that is getting to see some unfinished work on the production server. That said, today's new set of games is fairly polished.
Amazons
Amazons is a territory game with Chess-style queens. It's a very compelling game that I've wanted to add for quite a while. The AI is a little wanting. It makes sensible individual moves, but doesn't really see the global state of the board very well. Otherwise, Amazons is in very solid shape.
Nine Men's Morris
Nine Men's Morris is an ancient. abstract strategy game. I'm very pleased with the state of the UI, for NMM, but I'm more than a little disappointed with the AI. At an earlier stage in development I had a respectably smart bot, but I had trouble balancing the search depth. NMM is somewhat unique in the way that the branching factor can shift drastically throughout the course of a game. So, I've had a hard time finding a search depth that leads to smart play, but doesn't bog down at points in the game.
Pah-Tum
Pah-Tum is another ancient, abstract strategy game. Fans of n-in-a-row games should give this a try. It's a fun change of pace with it's randomly placed blocks and scoring system. I'm very happy with UI, though, again, the AI leaves a little to be desired.
Three Musketeers
Three Musketeers is a very unique addition to Vying Games. It's the first game we've added that features unequal forces and unequal objetives. This is the roughest of the new additions in the sense that I don't have any bots prepared for it. You can try it out against RandomBot (it does exactly what it's name suggests), and if you play as blue, you might find that even RandomBot provides a challenging game now and again.
Games List
There's a new list of games. As the number of games continues to grow, a summary table like this should become more and more handy.
New Layout for /
Speaking of more and more games, I think there are now too many games to show "screenshot" style listings on http://vying.org/. There's now a smaller list of featured games (that will change occasionally), and a link to the full listing I mentioned earlier.
New Layout for "about" pages
The "about" pages, listing the rules, top players, recent games, etc, for the games have been redone as well. In addition to the layout changes, open invites and tourney listings have been added. Hopefully this will give both open invites and tourneys a higher profile.
New Icons
I've done some work on the icons in the upper-right corner of every page. The envelope icon is now dedicated to messages. The new dice icons lead to the list of active games, and cycle through active games. There isn't really any new functionality there, I'm just hoping that the new icons will be a little more intuitive.
30 Day Time Limits
There's now a server wide default of 30 day time limits on all human vs human games. Like the tourney time limits that's 30 days per turn. These time limits aren't intended to rush play, but rather to allow abandoned games to time out.
And, Much, Much More
There have been other changes, in addition, to those mentioned above. But, by comparison, they're all pretty minor, so I'll leave them for you to discover on your own. : ))
As with any release, please, please, please, let me know if you find any bugs. This release is much larger than the typical release, and even though I think it's pretty sound, there are bound to be bugs. If you find something, please post on the forums or send me a PM. Or, if you prefer, you can try me via email.
Thanks, have fun, and happy holidays!
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john aitek says,