Archive for the ‘programming’ Category

Pentecost programming

Monday, June 13th, 2011

For some reason almost everyone in Norway have the day of on “Pentecost Monday”. Not that I’m complaining, I slept until noon, got up to watch Doctor Who and Game of Thrones, but also managed to get lots of work done on my Startrek Game.

The game is almost ready for a little pre-alpha test which I’ve got about 15 volunteers ready for. Today I completed the final feature that will be implemented before this test, and maybe the most important feature of them all.

Trekwar Ship Combat

It was nice to see those stupid fleets that have been moving around my screen finally do something violent. My technologically superior (I cheat) scoutship blew that poor Klingon while taking almost no damage.

Implementing the combat between spaceships took about 5-6 hours of work today (lots of rules for selecting which ships to fight, calculate if they hit, calculate damage, etc..), so now I can start working on the testing scenario that all the testers will be playing through before the big multiplayer test starts.

Toodledo API (simple java version)

Sunday, June 5th, 2011

Wanted to get a list of all the bugs for my Star Trek game, that I have registered at Toodledo and have them listed on the Trekwar wiki.

Toodledo offers a nicely done API, but there was no java implementation, there were a couple of unofficial ones, but I decided to write my own very simple basic program for connecting to Toodledo and getting all the tasks as XML, and parsing them into a simple Java object. So if you’re doing something similar, this program might be a nice place to start. To keep it as short as possible, comments and exception handling is pretty much not there :)

download the file: Toodledo2html.java

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.StringReader;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;
import java.security.MessageDigest;
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.logging.Level;
import java.util.logging.Logger;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
import org.xml.sax.InputSource;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
 
class Task {
    String id;
    String title;
    String modified;
    String completed;
 
    String folder;
    String context;
    String tag;
    String status;
    String priority;
    String length;
    String note;
}
 
public class Toodledoo2html {
    // TODO you must get the 4 values below from Toodledo
    private static String appID = "x";
    private static String userID = "x";
    private static String userPW = "x";
    private static String applicationToken = "x";
 
    private static String fields = "folder,context,tag,status,priority,length,note"; // get these fields when downloading tasks
 
    private static String sessionToken;
    private static String key;
 
    private static String toodledoTokenURL = "https://api.toodledo.com/2/account/token.php";
    private static String toodledoGetTaskURL = "https://api.toodledo.com/2/tasks/get.php";
 
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        sessionToken = getSessionToken(md5(userID+applicationToken));
        key = md5(md5(userPW)+applicationToken+sessionToken);
        ArrayList<Task> tasks = getTasks();
        // do whatever to tasks
    }
 
    private static ArrayList<Task> getTasks() {
        try {
            String data = "?key=" + key + ";fields=" + fields + ";f=xml";
 
            System.out.println("Getting tasks: " + toodledoGetTaskURL + data);
 
            URL url = new URL(toodledoGetTaskURL + data);
            URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
            connection.setDoOutput(true);
 
            BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(connection.getInputStream()));
            StringBuilder xml = new StringBuilder();
            String line = in.readLine();
            while( line != null) {
                System.out.println(line);
                xml.append(line);
                line = in.readLine();
            }
            in.close();
 
            ArrayList<Task> tasks = xmlToTasks(xml.toString());
 
            for(Task t : tasks) {
                System.out.println(t.id + " " + t.title);
            }
            return tasks;
 
        } catch (MalformedURLException ex) {
            System.out.println(ex);
        } catch (IOException ioe) {
            System.out.println(ioe);
        }
        return null;
    }
 
    private static ArrayList<Task> xmlToTasks(String xml) {
        ArrayList<Task> taskList = new ArrayList<Task>();
 
        try {
            DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
            DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
            Document doc = db.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xml)));
 
            Element root = doc.getDocumentElement();
 
            NodeList tasks = root.getElementsByTagName("task");
            for (int i = 0; i < tasks.getLength(); i++) {
                Element task = (Element) tasks.item(i);
 
                Task t = new Task();
                t.id = getDomTextValue(task, "id");
                t.title = getDomTextValue(task, "title");
                t.modified = getDomTextValue(task, "modified");
                t.completed = getDomTextValue(task, "completed");
 
                t.folder = getDomTextValue(task, "folder");
                t.context = getDomTextValue(task, "context");
                t.tag = getDomTextValue(task, "tag");
                t.status = getDomTextValue(task, "status");
                t.priority = getDomTextValue(task, "priority");
                t.length = getDomTextValue(task, "length");
                t.note = getDomTextValue(task, "note");
                taskList.add(t);
            }
 
        } catch (ParserConfigurationException ex) {
            Logger.getLogger(Toodledoo2html.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
        }
        catch(SAXException se) {
 
        }
        catch(IOException ioe) {
 
        }
 
        System.out.println("xmlToTasks got " + taskList.size() + " tasks");
        return taskList;
    }
 
    private static String getSessionToken(String signature) {
        try {
            String data = "?userid=" + userID + ";appid=" + appID + ";sig=" + signature + ";f=xml";
 
            System.out.println("Getting session token: " + toodledoTokenURL+data);
 
            URL url = new URL(toodledoTokenURL + data);
            URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
            connection.setDoOutput(true);
 
            BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(connection.getInputStream()));
            String xml = in.readLine();
            in.close();
            String token = xml.substring(xml.indexOf("<token>")+7, xml.indexOf("</token>"));
            return token;
        } catch (MalformedURLException ex) {
            System.out.println(ex);
        }
        catch(IOException ioe) {
            System.out.println(ioe);
        }
        return "";
    }
 
    private static String md5(String input) {
        try {
            MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");
            md.update(input.getBytes());
 
            byte byteData[] = md.digest();
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            for (int i = 0; i < byteData.length; i++) {
                sb.append(Integer.toString((byteData[i] & 0xff) + 0x100, 16).substring(1));
            }
            return sb.toString();
        } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException nse) {
            System.err.println("ERROR. MD5 ALGORITHM NOT FOUND");
            return "";
        }
    }
 
    public static String getDomTextValue(Element element, String tag) {
        if (element != null) {
            NodeList nl = element.getElementsByTagName(tag);
            if (nl != null && nl.getLength() > 0) {
                Element el = (Element) nl.item(0);
                if(el != null && el.getFirstChild() != null) {
                    return el.getFirstChild().getNodeValue();
                }
            }
        }
        return "";
    }
}

Note: This program was made to run once per hour.. running this program many times in a row will cause Toodledo to ban you for about 1 hour. When that happens there will be a IndexOutOfBoundsException -7 from the method that gets the session token. This can be fixed by saving the token you get between requests, and not asking for a new one each time (which is what causes the short ban).

Scrum tool (Jira vs Toodledo)

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

Up until recently I’ve been using ToDoList (read my previous post about it) to keep track of all tasks that needs to be done for the Trekwar project.

Don’t get me wrong, ToDoList is very nice, except there are a few drawbacks that made me go look for a replacement.

  • It’s Windows only, so using it from linux would be cumbersome
  • It’s not online, so I have to sync the file between different computers
  • It’s hard to share the list, or make it public (there is html report, but the output is not very nice, and you’ll have to generate the file + upload it) which is a hassle.
  • It’s hard to use this to get a good view of what is needed for a specific release (like to view every task that is needed for alpha, beta or release)

JIRA
I’ve used JIRA a bit at my real job, and it’s pretty good. It’s online, and I installed it on my server to give it a try. I quickly had to abandon that idea seeing that JIRA is extremely bloated.. It uses like 600 MB of ram just starting up, no idea what it uses the memory for, it’s not doing anything remotely fancy that would require that amount of memory.

So I decided to run it from my desktop computer, now I get the same problems as with ToDoList with having to sync files between computers, and difficulty making the task list public. Also the interface itself is pretty bloated and slow, even tough it has pretty nice views for planning and when doing the tasks.

Toodledo
In trying once more to find the perfect tool for managing the tasks of my scrum like development, I tried out Toodledo. I found out about it because minecraft (awesome game BTW) also uses Toodledo as a public task list. Which is good as it lets people following projects get a sense of how much work/time is needed until the next milestone.

Toodledo is a online to do list, and it works very nicely for scrum development. It’s quick and easy without all the bloat of JIRA and gives you pretty much the same information.

It’s very easy to add tasks (subtasks require a pro account which is 15$ per year, well worth the money), and you can create context’s like “alpha”, “beta”, “release”, etc.. and add folders/tags which can be anything. There are lots of different views, I mostly use the main view which has all the tasks grouped by context and sorted by priority. There is also a view for seeing all the tasks in a particular context (like alpha) and the estimated time for all the tasks. (currently 94 hours of work needed before Trekwar can go into alpha).

My only problem with Toodledo is that subtasks don’t show up in the public view, but it should be implemented shortly. Another great thing about Toodledo is the forum, which is frequently visited by the staff/developers.

So if you’re looking for a good way to organize your project, I can definitely recommend Toodledo, and you can try it for free at their website.

For an example you can look at the Trekwar Todo list

Trekwar Fog Of War

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

It’s been too long since I got any programming done on my Star Trek game Trekwar, but today I managed to implement animation support on the main map, as well as get the sensor system and fog of war working (still needs a bit of tweaking):

I’ve gotten a new job, and been working on another paying project as well (Comicon does not pay for itself you know). But this other project is almost done, and then I should be able to get back to doing regular Trekwar updates.

I’ve also switched over to Toodledo for maintaining the list of features to be implemented, so hopefully you can see the issues under “0.4.0 (Alpha)” shrinking over the next few months :)

Lady Java (Javazone song)

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Check out this awesome music video for JavaZone

I guess we CAN make cool music that’s not Black Metal. Haven’t felt such a surge of patriotism since the good old days.

The song says what I’ve been saying for years (except I’m usually not as polite): “Some people prefer other languages, and that’s OK if you’re retarded I guess”

Oups

Monday, March 15th, 2010

While cleaning up in the core classes of Trekwar yesterday (documenting functions, formatting/structuring code, minor improvements) I also saw lots of equals(Object o) methods. And in my infinite wisdom I decided to use generics since it is used pretty extensively throughout the code anyway, so I changed basically all the equals methods.

example:

public boolean equals(Object o) {
        if(o instanceof Structure)
            return equals((Structure)o);
        return false;
    }

was changed to:

public boolean equals(Structure s2) {
        return name.equals(s2.getName());
    }

Now this is not a problem when writing code, as you pretty much always compare objects of the same type. However, the code also uses the Java Collections contains() method a few places, and it always uses the equals(Object) version. So when my classes no longer provided this method, the default one inherited from java.lang.Object was used instead. This caused a strange array of bugs to appear (star systems on the map not shown with faction color/icon except for the Cardassians for some strange reason, users not having any technologies, unable to build any structures, generally erratic behavior, etc..). Luckily I discovered the cause pretty quickly and only wasted about an hour or so on this :)

I guess the lesson is that objects that needs to be compared, directly or indirectly by contains() or other methods, should always define an equals(Object) method that just passes the call along to the equals method written with generics.

public boolean equals(Object o) {
        if(o instanceof Structure) {
            return equals((Structure)o);
        }
        return false;
    }

And perhaps that you should not mess around with your code for hours on end without stopping to test if you broke it once in a while :)

Debug poem

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Today I wasted two hours locating and fixing a trivial bug:

“Spent hours debugging my code, fixing hacks
but somehow mistook Math.min() for Math.max()”

Today I wasted 5 minutes trying to think of something that rhymes with “Math.max()”

Trekwar cargo system

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Today I mostly finished the Trekwar Cargo system, so now it’s possible to collect resources and bring them back to your starsystems.

Also included 4 images from the design and implementation of the UI:

Read full devblog post at trekwar.org

Google maps API

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

I was checking out Sven’s page, and found his awesome map of trails (“greenlanes”) in his neighborhood.

I have my own map, but this is on my google maps, so not really very user friendly or manageable, so today I decided to try and use the google maps API.

I’m pretty pleased with the result, a single .html file with almost only javascript. Now I can just export the paths and add a single line in the .html file and the new track will be added to the maps and menu. I’m going to add sorting of the tracks by difficulty, length and maybe based on their distance from Trondhiem sometimes later.

The page is very easy to use, and if you want to make a list of tracks (or any form of lines), just check out the page source code which has 3 simple instructions on how to get it working

I probably won’t be adding many tracks until around the start of May.

Trekwar sensor system

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

I haven’t had much time working on Trekwar lately, but I’ve recently made a prototype of the sensor system:

I’ll have to add this, as well as fog of war when I’m done with the fleet management tools which are almost ready.

> Read the whole devblog post @ trekwar.org