Systems Development

Give yourself a hand

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:37:34 +0000

There is now enough logic in the system to shuffle, deal, and play a hand. The system knows who dealt and it knows the order of play. It can tell which player won a trick. It does not check that a player follows suit. Next I will make it keep score and declare a game won.

Chocolate in the peanut butter!

admin — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 03:08:48 +0000

As you can imagine, my inbox was stuffed this morning with the observations of astute readers. Chief among their concerns was the fact that the view logic (of knaves’ application class) contained a lot of state management logic. Too right! To make amends, I have refactored the ApplicationModel a bit, and added a Player class. Now the view logic’s interaction with state logic is intuitively concise, as in:
protected function application1_creationCompleteHandler(event:FlexEvent):void { applicationModel = new ApplicationModel(); applicationModel.signInPlayer("Slim"); applicationModel.signInPlayer("Willie"); applicationModel.signInPlayer("You"); applicationModel.deal(); }

Quite.

Knaves

admin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:51:02 +0000

I’ve been thinking of a new project, to be used as the starting point for the refactoring of my blog. Oh! BTW, my blog has been refactored. It is still about development, but not so much about java. This is especially true for client-side stuff. I’ve been using flex for the past few years, and this is where I’ll begin here. I have decided to create a flex app as the starting point here. I have chosen to do a game. The code needs to be small enough for the casual reader and the game needs to be casual; I lack the artistic skills and the attention span to create an epic. I love card games, and so that is where I will begin.

Knaves is a card game. It’s for 3 players. The rules are simple.

This will be a pragmatic affair; I’ll start simple and work in increments. Some things will be crude at first, to be polished later. I am using google to host the code. Here is the google project.

The project is not yet a card game. It will shuffle, deal 3 hands, and display the 3 hands + the trump card (aka kitty).

Experienced developers will recognize that the CardDeck is somewhat inelegant. I could spend weeks exploring the nuances of card-ish behaviors. But that would not be pragmatic. What I’ve created will suffice for months and months of development fun.

Next I will implement tricks. A trick will have a leader. The other 2 players will have to follow suit. Then we’ll figure out who wins the trick.