One Step Forward

This week I made progress on Oaqn because of So Play We All when it would’ve otherwise been a loss because of busy life. I didn’t get anything huge done because my brain was a bit fried, but I cleaned up and prepared next week to include my first gameplay. Pardon if this is a little less well-written than usual, I’m getting it published with literally two minutes to spare — this week really has been that crazy.

Last week I gave Luke some code, which his response mentioned appreciating. And we had our first tie, exciting. Luke had to add code to display that right on SPWA.com. Jim was surprised not to get any votes because his code improvements seemed bigger to him. You’ve gotta flaunt the goods, man, if you don’t have screenshots or a demo running, people won’t ever think you did much. Notice that you ran away with it last week when your big docs site appeared.

On to this week!

I started off adding consistency_fail to check for missing database indexes (a nice little performance checkup) and reported a small bug in it.

It may not sound like much, but then I added a big signup button to the homepage. It’s easy for people to miss the small ‘register’ link in the header. I’m going to close the ‘Founding Player’ badge next week, so this is your last chance to get it.

Next, I did a big cleanup of the Steppe integration, updating to jQuery 1.6.2, removing the last vestiges of the word “demo” scattered around, matched code formatting, and renamed the integrated view to ‘worldview’ to match its purpose. I removed the movement buttons and built last week’s easyXDM demo into a solid pub/sub path for data using code from phiggins.

The non-nerd version: there’s no more faked-out demo code. The worldview you see is now based on exactly where you are in the world and what cities are in the database, live. When you (can) move your caravan, it’ll appear properly.

Speaking of cities and caravans, Steppe is getting sprites now. It’s an awesome, difficult feature improvement by Andrew J. Baker, with thanks to my anonymous Utah friend who helped explain some of the 3D math involved. I might be able to start showing sprites of players and places as early as next week, which is awesome.

So, the final list is:

  • consistency_fail
  • big register button on homepage
  • rename from Demo.js
  • pub/sub http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/pubsub-screencast
  • fix indent from 4 to 2
  • update to jQuery 1.6.2
  • rename ‘steppe’ to ‘worldview’
  • deploy: cp -a s.oaqn.com/worldview to new release, then rsync -ad
  • remove movement
  • load player’s plat and position
  • reset all player positions in db to match nice view
  • create new cities in prod db to match map (sorta hitting the “content generation” theme)
  • add city icon
  • load cities to table with images
  • render
  • worldview for people who are not logged in

I look at all of this and see how easily it could’ve been “nothing” and I’m very happy with my progress this week. It’s not the core gameplay I’d hoped to do, but it’s a lot of things I didn’t even realize I had to do to get that working. :)

Please vote for Oaqn in this week’s poll.

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