The ASCII Collab Club

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19:14

El'endia Starman has unfrozen this room.

PhiNotPi

Who is interested in doing another collaborative programming project?

Conor O'Brien

What would it be about?

PhiNotPi

@ConorO'Brien So far they've been simple ASCII-art games, but we can do pretty much anything we want.

Conor O'Brien

that's sounds pretty cool

maybe we should start off with tic-tac-toe to get things started

if that hasn't been done already that is

PhiNotPi

We've done Hangman and Checkers, and also a little bit of Chess (although I wasn't as involved in that one).

Conor O'Brien

19:30

so the objective of these things is to make an aesthetically pleasing, ASCII-art thing?

PhiNotPi

"aesthetically pleasing" is a little bit of an overstatement. The main reason it's ASCII is that graphics are hard/complicated, and we wanted to focus on the actual "game" programming.

Conor O'Brien

I see. I don't suppose it should be too hard to make it like not like crap tho

PhiNotPi

I don't really want to do tic-tac-toe. Too overdone idea.

Ideally, we should pick something that is somewhat modular... as in, it allows multiple people to work on different parts of it at once.

Conor O'Brien

19:53

@PhiNotPi and too simple.

@PhiNotPi hm. we could try making hexplode

then there would be a few modules, like graphics, data layout, bot AI

PhiNotPi

@ConorO'Brien rules?

Conor O'Brien

> Each of the players on his turn will put a count in one of the hexagons. You can do this by using the arrow keys. Each of the hexagons can contain as many counters as it has neighbours. At the moment a hexagon is reaching this maximum amount it (h)explodes to its neighbours. Any number of counts in these neighbouring hexagons will be taken by the exploding hexagon and will increase the total number of the player. In this way you can win or loose counts. When one of the players is out of counts he looses. Especially when the board is almost filled, one explosion can give a chain reaction c…

PhiNotPi

somewhat facetious: we should aim high and write dwarf fortress

Conor O'Brien

haha that's a little too high

IMO

PhiNotPi

20:09

I guess I'm fine with hexplode.

We should figure out who all else is interested in participating and see what they want to do.

Conor O'Brien

20:43

true

Anonymous

eh wot is this

Helka Homba

I'd like to see simple multiplayer browser-based games that can be played without logging in to anything, where anyone can start a new game. Like en.battleship-game.org/id40835029.

PhiNotPi

@Mego collaborative programming projects... usually ASCII-art/command-line games and stuff.

Anonymous

What about Monopoly?

quartata

This room is ancient. I didn't even know Hosch used to hang out with filthy golfers

El'endia Starman

21:12

@HelkaHomba I was actually thinking recently on how to implement multiplayer for little games I could develop and put on my website.

quartata

Could make them peer to peer with websockets. The server would only need to handle connecting everyone at the beginning

El'endia Starman

I was thinking repeated Ajax requests. I did try looking at websockets a little while ago, but they seemed to be pretty complicated.

quartata

I've been pondering for a while how to do P2P without letting peope cheat

muddyfish

I might be interested in this depending on the project.

PhiNotPi

@muddyfish what kinds of projects are you interested in?

Helka Homba

21:23

How about a simple (nonpolitical) voting game: Everyone visiting the url can either choose A or choose B, and switch their choice whenever they want. Every 60 seconds the votes are instantly tallied and the letter with the majority wins. Those people get a point, the losers lose a point. However, if there's ever a letter with 0 votes, everyone loses 10 points.

quartata

nethack pls

PhiNotPi

@quartata part of me wants to do this (see my mentions of dwarf fortress above)

quartata

@HelkaHomba I could do this in about an hour with mod_perl but i'd need someone else to do the CSS

also this reminds me of something

Conor O'Brien

@quartata I volunteer!

Helka Homba

And maybe if there's only 1 person in the minority they would get 10 points.

Conor O'Brien

21:25

except this isn't quite ascii

muddyfish

@PhiNotPi not sure yet :P

El'endia Starman

@quartata Well, I've got the idea of making urls in two parts: the first part is for the specific game/connection, and the second is for the player. These can be stored in a database, and when I get a request from any given url, I check it against the database.

muddyfish

Making nethack\dwarf fortress would be fun

I've recently tried procedurally generating Zelda-like dungeons. It would be interesting to build a proc genned RPG style game

quartata

@ConorO'Brien Well I was going to be working on Pytek set builders but I suppose this is a more noble cause

On it

@HelkaHomba Any suggestions for the name? :P

Conor O'Brien

"TRUMPDOWN"

(this is merely a joke please do not use this name)

Anonymous

21:35

> (nonpolitical)

Conor O'Brien

but but but ok

PhiNotPi

@muddyfish the key would be making it "super modular" so that it doesn't take much effort to add additional functionality. The main thing that I think leads to the demise of the lot of these projects is that it can take a while to reap the rewards of all of the effort it takes.

3

quartata

@ConorO'Brien No one suggested a name so I'm calling the directory "Votey McVoteFace"

(Just kidding)

Anonymous

@quartata Actually that sounds fantastic

quartata

Wait, really?

Conor O'Brien

21:41

it's better than all the other suggestions

quartata

OK....

Qwerp-Derp

21:53

Heyo guys

quartata

OK the Perl bits are almost done. Now I have to do the yucky JS bits.

I can't even AJAX

El'endia Starman

I just use jQuery for the Ajax...

quartata

Ew no

Qwerp-Derp

22:53

jQuery is great

Helka Homba

23:12

@quartata Are you really making the voting thing?

quartata

Not currently, I'm working on something else.

I have part of it.

Helka Homba

Cool. Though no need to on my account, was just an idea :p

quartata

I liked the idea. It reminded me of a forum game I used to play a long long time ago.

Qwerp-Derp

Should we make Atomas using ASCII?

Just throwing a suggestion out there

Helka Homba

@quartata as for the gui it could be as simple as two radio buttons for A and B with a dynamic "current votes for this letter" display, and the timer (and maybe the rules)

quartata

23:15

Oh, I was going to make it so that you couldn't see the current votes

I was going to have radio buttons, a timer, the leaderboard and the results from the last round basically

Helka Homba

@quartata Ok. Can be interesting either way. A "total players" thing would be nice though.

quartata

Yeah, I'll have something like that most likely.

Hosch250

23:55

Have you decided on anything?

Conor O'Brien

@Hosch250 hi :D

Hosch250

I got invited by Phii as the founder of the whole thing.

Conor O'Brien

we haven't decided on anything yet

Hosch250

On the other hand, it looks like I got approved to write a Windows app for Lichess.

Conor O'Brien

o.o

Hosch250

23:56

The basic additional feature will be playing offline.

Either against the machine, or making correspondence moves and the app will automatically move later when it can connect.

Conor O'Brien

that's pretty sweet

Destructible Watermelon

I made part of an ascii art game thing, but not much progress is done on it

Hosch250

Anyone want to help? I want to do the logic in F# (to learn it), and the UI in C# because UI's work better with OOP than FP.

I won't start it until at least November. Really struggling to get my school done on time.

Conor O'Brien

I don't know either language really well

Hosch250

Yeah, I procrastinate way too much.

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The ASCII Collab Club