Monday, December 21, 2009

Version 2 – A Fresh Beginning

I’m slowly working on Forge version 2. I’ve been sandbagging (i.e. goofing off) for probably a year or so but I’m making slow but steady progress. Like building a house, I’m starting at the foundation, phases. I’m making sure that you or the computer can play first, as well as implementing phase stops like Magic Online.

I have started version 2 multiple times and I have some very good code that I can use but basically I’m starting completely over. Starting over sounds very bad, even to me, but hopefully I can build something that is truly wonderful instead of a program that is held together with duck tape. Duck tape works but it often leads to weird, complicated problems in the future.

To put things into perspective, I probably have 30 lines of code and 10 or so methods. This is a small but promising start on such a big project. Currently Forge has more than 30,000 lines of code. I’m guessing that version 2 with 10 cards and an improved AI will have around 1,000 to 5,000 lines of code, I would like to predict when this will happen but I’ll leave the fortune-telling to gypsies and Las Vegas gamblers.

I consider Forge a complete success because it has more than 2,000 cards and is infinitely replayable. Forge is also a successful open-source project that continues to be updated even without my help. Forge is “computerized heaven” for casual players like myself.

3 comments:

wololo said...

I don't know how you count lines of code, but last time I checked, Forge had around 70'000 lines of code, not 30'000 (revision 200 or so...).

Including more than 50'000 for the CardFactory* files, which is 10 times more than what it should be, see my thread on the forum regarding that.

Good luck with version 2. I myself am not confident with starting over, if I were to start something again, it would be a different game. Or maybe not a game. Maybe not even programming at all :)

Anonymous said...

wish I could program to help you out; it's still the only proper magic game you can play by yourself, your perseverance is much appreciated

if graphics & game setups are also optimized then I can easily see every magic player having this on their desktop

Forge said...

I'm probably way off about the number of lines, I just looked up an old article on my blog.

wololo - "Good luck with version 2."

Well as long as I don't put too much pressure on myself it will be ok. No one knew about version 1 until I had completed it. (It has taken probably 1 whole year to learn to NOT put pressure on myself, lol.)