Castles and Stats

What, you thought Chess Avatara was dead? HA!

Still going on. I get to work on it for an hour or so a night, sometimes more, oftentimes less. But, I've already hit my two goals for the night, so I'll blog about the progress whilst I watch the rest of the Met game on GameCast.

Well, to start with, a couple nights ago I solidified the Hibernate implementation in the server. This is good news for many reasons:

* The MySQL database is now officially hooked up.
* I can now maintain stats and real users.
* I got to learn Hibernate.
* We use Hibernate at work, so it comes in handy right away. :-)

So far, the database is able to manage users and records. It can authorize user logins, so now I've switched to a system where I have to enter a real login name instead of using some random one.

Also, as of last night, I maintain records for the two users in the system: ZaBlanc and Yogi. So, when you win or lose or draw, your record is updated. Neat!

Today's goal was to parlay that record into a rating that is sent to the game screen, so the two players know each others records. That has been done...though instead of a rating (1264), you see something like (3W 2L 2D).

The rating calculations will come really soon, when I figure out how. ;-)

Another little addition tonight was to make some sorta ad hoc title screen. I actually drew a wicked sweet abstract castle. I am proud. :-) It may never see the light of day in the final game, but it does fill up the opening screen nicely.

The next few items of work include displaying all the pieces that have been captured in a game, undo'ing a move (really important when a player mistakenly moves a piece to the wrong square), and the aforementioned ratings system.

In terms of defects, we're still pretty solid. The only real problem area still seems to be the chat system which is both a bit buggy and a bit non-intuitive to use. I'm going to add some mouse functionality to make it a lot easier.

So, next up is probably undo. When Matt and I played the only serious game ever attempted on Avatara, the only issue we ran into was when he accidentally moved a rook and dropped it on the wrong square. He wanted to take it back, but we had to do some manual intervention to correct things. Aside from that, the game went swimmingly...(Oh, he couldn't resign yet either, but that's since been added.)

All is well. Carry on.