November 2008

It is probably not a secret to those who check the svn regularly, but Wagic is now available for Linux as well, thanks to the great work of J.

JGE++ is probably now the only library in the world that allows to compile a C++ game for Windows, Linux, and the PSP from the same source code !

What else, the Linux version allows to resize the screen, which is a nice bonus compared to the Windows version. This is a very short video that shows resizing, I just wanted to share it here

It sometimes takes a while to get the correct implementation of a specific part for a piece of software. I’ve spent months thinking about Wagic without coding one single line in the hope that my design would be perfect from the start. That was, obviously, very pretentious. After a few months of thinking, I realized that if I didn’t start coding soon, the project would be dead before even being born. So I gave up on my “perfect design” idea and started coding dirty things.

Well the result is not so bad, but there are lots of awful flaws in the initial design of Wagic that need to be solved.

Take the phases of a game, for example. Until now, they were completely hardcoded and managed by the “GameObserver” an object that basically controls all the events of the game.

The main problem is that cards have no control on the GameObserver, and therefore have no control on the way phases work. And this matters because, due to this flaw, cards such as Stasis or Time Stop couldn’t be implemented in Wagic so far.

But I’ve recently had the idea to replace these hardcoded horrors with a nice object called the Phase Ring (Most of my ideas come at very impractical times, when I’m not in front of my computer. And I fight hard to remember them, sometimes writing them down on a conbini receipt because that’s the only thing close to a piece of paper available around me )

So basically the phases are now managed with an object that can be manipulated by the “abilities” in the game. It does not mean it’s become easy as pie to add these cards, but at least now it’s possible.

For the programmers out here… yeah, I know, I just replaced an array with a list… it doesn’t make it less cool

PS: I’ve spent an awful lot of time on the forums the past few weeks (reading and answering), but unfortunately this has had a bad result on my free time and on the time I actually spend coding. I’ll try to be less active over there, just for my own good, so don’t be offended if I don’t reply to all requests on the forum. I’m sure other members have the answers to most questions, after all that’s what communities are for

The svn repository for the code is now available at :

http://code.google.com/p/wagic

For the moment, you can only checkout a read-only version of the code. If you want to add changes to the game, send me directly your code. We’ll consider opening the project for writing to people who send us lots of useful code

You need to copy the Res folder of the PSP version to the Res folder of the sources for the game to run correctly

The latest sources are available in the download section. Please grab them and try to compile the game. The more people are able to compile the game, the more chances it has to be continued even if I give up at some point (not that this is the current plan, but you never know).

In addition, I wrote a page to help you compile the game under windows. Believe it or not, it is SUPER easy ! This is another oportunity for you to add the cards you cannot add simply through the _cards.dat files !

Read it here

I’m also putting for download an UNTESTED windows version. I know it runs on my machine and that’s all. You’ll see the controls are awful (adapted to my french keyboard), but this is mainly to help people who write new cards (in _cards.dat) testing their stuff, and for people who want to help us finding bugs. Feedback on this version is welcome (does it actually run on other computers ???)

If you want to know how to write tests for using with the test suite, read that !

Edit (2008/11/03) : the windows version has been corrected, and has now been confirmed to work on a Win XP computer