Stream Hosting Games
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Please bear with me ignorance as I attempt to describe the feature I would like to discuss.
The world is all about cell phones now.
The younger students in my graduate program put together power point presentations on their cell pones.
TripleA is a long game with long gaps in between turns.
The game uses extremely limited resources.I know android and Ios versions were requested before and were turned down because of technical issues. I am wondering if it might now be possible to creat an app with a GUI that could connect to a remote game and allow it to be played by streaming the game or something similar. Could this be done through the game lobby now available? Given the monthly costs to host a FPS shooter it seems like a TripleA server should be cheap. I know I have only PBEM.
Does this make sense? It seems to me this should be relatively easy to accomplish, but maybe not. I obviously do not understand the technical aspects of this idea.
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@JPW062 I am not sure if I understand you correctly, but apps such as TeamViewer or other Remote Desktop clients allow similar actions. So you can for example use TripleA with your smartphone by accessing your desktop computer at home.
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I never considered using teamviewer, but I guess that is a simple solution. The use of bandwidth would be significant. It would also require individuals to set-up a custom solution preventing widespread adoption. I was thinking an app simply to cut down on data volumes and allow anyone to easily play. The last discussion of this idea I saw was around 2017 and one of the major issues seemed to be a "monolithic" program instead of server and client split. I just wondered if it was now possible to simplify those issues by running all the processing remotely and only using a simple app for input.
Also, Teamviewer is $50 a month for a personal account.
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Changing the UI from swing to the more modern JavaFX UI technology for just the initial game launcher screens has so far been a multi-year project and is not complete. Doing that for the main game, let alone building in another UI technology is not looking good.. The barrier is that most logic is in the UI layer, the two are interleaved, disentangling them is a good project but needs lots of time and perhaps strategic rewrite of components.
With that said, our best bet would be something that can convert Swing applications to be able to run on mobile devices.
Some quick googling pulled up 'ajax swing', which looks slightly promising: http://www.creamtec.com/products/ajaxswing/solutions/java_swing_ui_on_ipad.html
We'd have to get someone to spend some time playing around with that to see if it would work, or maybe similar. Volunteers needed.
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Changing the UI from swing to the more modern JavaFX UI technology for just the initial game launcher screens has so far been a multi-year project and is not complete.
True, but to be fair most of the time there wasn't any active development on this, simply because it was and still is a tedious process to decouple all of the logic and not very fun at all. Which is the reason most of us are developing TripleA I think. At least that's the case for me.
However I have plans to continue developing the UI starting next month, hopefully to a point where the game can be launched at least in single player anytime soon.Once it is playable using the JavaFX UI (which will wrap Swing components for now), which might be feasible this year if I have the time and motivation, I hope that we will all stop adding swing components, but instead go for JavaFX exclusively so that eventually there won't be any swing components left.
But @LaFayette is right, for now any "simple port" solution would be the easiest and fastest way to achieve something like this.
The barrier is that most logic is in the UI layer, the two are interleaved
Plus, what makes this really hard to deal with is that this is noticeable across the entire codebase. You can't just migrate classes step by step, instead you have to sort-of-migrate a part and create an exception for non-migrated parts that are still using UI directly.
Also, Teamviewer is $50 a month for a personal account.
Only for commercial purposes. If you're using it just for yourself it's free. Obviously this isn't a general solution but if it works for you when you have a PC somewhere running TripleA that might be a fast solution as well.
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Sorry, that was a bit of a dig @RoiEX; your work on JavaFX is eagerly awaited. It's a reality with this project that tasks that should take one full time week, take a lot longer. It's really tough to work on projects when you only have 3 hours at a time here and there. I can think of some examples where professional work really occupied my time and various TripleA tasks that should have been one full time day instead took a month. I keep wondering if we're fool-hardy to have resurrected TripleA from its life-support-only mode 4 years ago, this project was nearly effectively frozen because it needed so much work to get anything done. The optimist part of me thinks that we've payed a lot of that cost, and if we're effective/efficient, we can really do some interesting things now.
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@LaFayette not foolhardy at all imo
I know I'm more of a nuisance than a help not that I try to be, but you guys have done a ton of work. It has already paid big dividends . Confident in a huge payoff coming up.A lot of people play triplea, even if not noticeable. I think it makes them, usually :), happier than if they didn't. It's a good impact you all do for just better all around good things.
Thank You
Oh yea, and when you're doing a bunch of stuff at once, it does take longer. It took me 3 years and 3 days to reroof my cabin lol. I really kicked ass the last 3 days
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I have played TripleA for more than a decade on and off. TripleA offers a good chance to play the game in person with considerable gains in speed due to eliminating set-up and considerable amounts of resolving combat due to dice rolls. I played my first game in game lobby last night. It was so much better than PBEM. The work being done IS APPRECIATED. I view TripleA as one of the most successful open source projects out there. I know there is continued work, but this is one of few projects that has actually resulted in a quality product that ifunctions. The project has also survived several change in homes and I am sure few if any of the people working on it today are the same as those when I first downloaded the game.
I read through most of the Ajax Swing page to see what that was about. What is stopping this method from being used? I considered sending them an e-mail inquiring if their product would be a good choice for TripleA, inquiring about costs, etc., but I fear my ignorance on the details of the subject would result in my inquiry not being taken seriously or yield actionable information.
I considered developing a game a decade ago and investigated outsourcing programming to India. The quotes returned were startlingly low. If there are boring, repetitive low level tasks that need to be handled to move the project forward, would it be worth considering farming those aspects of the project out in order to make the "fun" programming more accessible?
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@JPW062 Thanks for feedback, interesting idea on outsourced development. We'd probably want at least 160 hours worth. It can be hit or miss as we would want mostly work to untangle various parts of the mess. I suppose 90% of programming is the more tedious stuff, which is okay, it's just part of the work. Once we have more of the current jumble untangled, more items should move faster. We need quality tests to be written but to also do that we need for the code to have its UI and logic split. If it's really something worth coordinating, a dedicated discussion topic would be good to open IMO to explore the idea in more detail.
Ajax swing does look pretty promising, I did not realize though that it seems really pricey. @JPW062 , if you want to reach out to them and ask if they can do an open source license, or how much it would cost, do please feel free! I fear it may be a dead-end though if it'll be thousands of dollars, hard to say if that is truly worth it.
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Well, I have contacted and followed up without any response. Scratch that idea.
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@JPW062 Thanks for investigating. With luck we'll gradually continue to attract more people to TripleA code development.
