So I was gearing up this afternoon to start work again on my Mobile Briscola project when I noticed something funny... there were a couple methods I had written that were empty.

But I knew I had written that code because the feature works on the version I have on my cellphone. The only explanation I have for this is that I must have lost the source code once about a year ago when I reformatted, but I found those backups. Then put those backups into source control. Problem is, those backups are about 4 days older than the post I wrote on this blog about writing those new features...

Anyways, no point in freaking out about it now. Those lines are lost into the harsh electric fields of my harddrive, never to be recovered again.

On the plus side, it forces me to re-write a bunch of the stuff here to try and get rid of this pesky null reference error I keep getting. I have this idea that I am smarter than I was when I wrote this so maybe I'll be able to do it properly this time. The only annoying part is code that is missing worked really damn well.

After reformatting my harddrive to make way for Windows Vista I realised that I forgot to back up some files.



Those files were all the images and source code for Mobile Briscola. Luckily I had copies of the images all over the place (not sure exactly why) but more importantly since I was using Subversion I had versioned copies of every source file in the repository. So a quick checkout of the files got everything back!!!



I did a recompile and it seems there there were a few changes I made from when i put a version on my cellphone. The controls aren't how I remember them, but I still get the nullpointerexpection errors, so I've still got a bit of work to do to clean that up.



Hopefully I'll be motivated enough to work on it, but its going to be tough with World of Warcraft taking up most of my free time on the weekends! I hit level 61 the other day, and I've got about 200 gold in the bank. I'm saving up for my Epic Kodo so I can get some faster travel speeds.



We also ordered Bell Sympatico because I have been getting fed up with my Rogers internet speeds. Hopefully Sympatico is much better (they should be because they aren't actively blocking certain applications or throttling traffic because they don't have as much of a vested interest in their network infrastructure as Rogers does... jerks trying to saturate it with tons of services). The new modem should arrive tomorrow, but the service won't be activated until Friday. So a weekend long World of Warcraft binge should be a good enough test of the speeds.

Well, I got a hell of a lot of work done on mobile briscola since the last post. I scanned in my deck of italian cards, added two splash/title screens, implemented record keeping (keeps track of wins, losses, ties and the highest and lowest points recorded from all the games). The game is very stable too, except for a little null pointer issue when trying to start a new game during or after the first game has ended.



So, other than fixing that one little bug all that is left to do is implement some intelligent AI, then I think the game will be ready for public consumption! If I feel ambitious enough I'll try to tackle the AI problem tonight, otherwise it will probably have to wait until after I get back from my little vacation (more on that in the next post).

I honestly can't believe I've stuck around with this game for so long. I thought for sure it would become yet another afterthought on my long list of awesome ideas that never get executed (see: Website Update Thingy, Online Multiplayer Briscola).



Where I am now is pretty much the same as when I last posted. Well, not really. I discovered a bug in the endgame that caused the last hand to never get played out (I can't believe I didn't notice before that only 19 hands instead of 20 were being played). So I spent the majority of today tracking down that bug, and it is now fixed. And I also added a title screen, so I guess I can scratch that off the checklist.



I'm holding off on the new AI and record keeping until I can acquire some card images. I figure, those two things are useless if I can't actually SEE what my cards are. Instead right now I'm having to interpret a cryptic sequence of numbers and letters to figure out what suit and value my cards are.



So, thats where it stands. I think I can be done everything by next weekend. But that is not a deadline, because as soon as I start making those all hell breaks loose and nothing ever gets accomplished.

Well, I FREAKING DID IT!! MobileBriscola is coded and playable in all its glory! Right now it is basically just gameplay, and some really shitty AI (I actually can't really call it AI, it isn't intelligent at all. It just randomly chooses a card and plays it, kind of like playing against someone who doesn't understand the rules)



So, here is the checklist of stuff that needs to be added now:

• graphics
  
  
• Smart AI
  
  
• keep a record of wins/losses/ties
  
  
• figure out how to detect different button presses
  
  
• title screen
  
  
• other junk I can think of
  
  

Not a very detailed list, but its the basic idea. I hope I don't neglect this like I have with multiplayer briscola, but I can't really guarantee anything. I guess as long as I'm enjoying playing it I'll keep coding.



Once I get the more important of these features completed I'll try to make it available for download. Maybe even offer to pay people to download it (the cost of the data transfer, roughly $1) to their phones so I can test it out on different models to make sure it works.



I should probably mention the comments in the previous post, but I am not at all surprised about them. It is kind of artificial, like I know the people who wrote them and they told me they were going to do it. All I can say is that I haven't totally abandoned it. I do intend on completing it, I just needed a break and I found this other project MUCH more interesting at the time. Once its done I'll get right back on the multiplayer game. Unless of course I come up with another more interesting mobile project.

I feel so bad about this, but I haven't touched Online Multiplayer Briscola in over a month. More to the point, there hasn't even been a single thought about it since then.



But, I am going to kind-of resurrect it. Through the wonders of object oriented programming I bring to you Mobile Briscola. I am going to reuse the game mechanics part of the online briscola that I had completed. That was basically the only working part of that whole project.



I spent the last couple hours re-writing some parts to work with CLDC 1.0 because the sonovabitch doesn't support floating point. Can you believe that? What a piece of shit. If my phone supported CLDC 1.1 then I would have had no issues. But I guess this forces me to write compatible code that'll work on ANY cellphone. Which means lots and lots of people can use this wonderful game. That makes me happy.



So, basically I feel like I'm done. The only thing left to do now is (haha I keep saying that then never do anything) write a gameloop and figure out how to get input from the keypad. And THEN I need to write some AI. The first iteration of this will simply be the phone randomly choosing a card and playing it. Just for testing purposes. Afterwards I'll put some intelligence behind it to actually make the game hard.



And finally, I'll have to create a GUI. I might need to buy a book for that. But that will be down the road a ways. I want to make a solid game first, I'll worry about prettyness later.