I think it's important that we start from scratch decideing what we want this program to do without relying heavily on what other programs have done. But once we know about what we want, it would be a good idea to look at other similar prgrams to see (a) if we missed anything obvious, and (b) how the other programs went about doing those things. If Thoth has a good way to keep track of tokens, then we should borrow that rather than try and figure out how to do it ourselves. Obviously if an existing program has something we don't like, we will not borrow it :)
We are aware of such projects as Thoth, Cyberboard, Vassal, Zillions of Games and BrettSpielWelt, most of us have used them and found them to be lacking in one respect or another.
Before we get too far into the project (but after brainstorming what we want from the final product) we should take a look at the above mentioned programs as well as Apprentice
These programs have their good points and their bad points, and each one has ways of dealing with different aspects of the game, like drawing a card, or manipulating a pawn. I can't speak for Vassal or Zillions, and I have very limited experience with Thoth, but I know for a fact that in Apprentice you can draw cards in secret, put cards on the table face up or face down, rotate them, peek at your own facedown cards, flip them over, take control of opponent's cards that are on the table (or give control back), you can even do things like look at the top X cards of your deck and put them back in any order. It also lets you create a card and add it to your hand (useful for producing a token that wasn't there before).
- Seth
After months of absence, I came to bgdf for a quick glance. Became surprised to see a new forum and some “hype” about it: Online boardgame prototyping. I’m not against it, but I’m not with it either. I work in SW engineering, typically over 60hrs a week. When deadlines are getting closer, 80hrs is the rule. Boardgames for me is a hobby, transforming into more work sucks the fun right out. Besides, where would the “face-to-face” key factor of boardgaming end up being? The pretzels, the bears, the laughts? :cry:
IMHO, attempting to create a new platform from scratch is just re-inventing the wheel. I agree with Seth. I think that conducting a serious evaluation of currently available “platforms” such as the ones mentioned by Darke in the first thread should be the right approach.
I looked at Vassal once (2yrs ago) and appeared to be some kind of markup & scripting language. Mastering that platform may take some time but definitely a lot less than implementing a new platform, especially for computer savvies as many of the BGDF members driving this initiative are. In fact, Vassal is on sourceForge.net (open-source community). It appears to be written in Java (see www.vasl.org). If a feature or component doesn’t satisfy certain need, it could be modified.
I propose to set up a team responsible for implementing simple prototypes in each of these platforms to get a “feeling” of what the capabilities are and what’s the effort to use them.
Once the evaluation period concludes, we could engage in creating “modules” for certain common operations in boardgames (pawn movement, dice rolling, card dealing, etc.).
The most tricky piece to implement, IMO, is the rule set of any game: how/when things in the game happen. That would be the most time consuming part and, unfortunately, would have to be tackled by each individual prototyping his own creation.
Regards and good luck,
- Henddher