Posts Tagged ‘trekwar’
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012
I’m finally done with all of the user interface tasks in the current Trekwar sprint. And while I don’t have anything against Swing, it’s going to be sooo nice just working on the server backend for a while :D

For more info on what’s been going on lately with Trekwar see the devblog post on the Trekwar site.
Tags: game, interface, java, programming, swing, Trek, trekwar, ui, user interface, wiki
Posted in Computers, Games, programming | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
My main server has been a virtual server at vps.net for a couple of years now, but today I moved it to a dedicated server with Hetzner.de for two reasons:
- The VPS <-> SAN connection at vps.net has been down around 5 times the last year, putting the filesystem into read only mode and requiring a manual restart
- It’s not possible to get a VPS with high amounts of memory without it becoming ridiculously expensive
The dedicated server is not that much more expensive than the VPS I had, but it’s a bit faster and instead of just 1.2 GB ram it has 24 GB. So now I’ll be able to run several very large Trekwar games now that alpha testing is approaching.
Today I spent a good portion of the day moving stuff over.
Mumble: This was literally just tar’ing it and ssh’ing it to the new computer.
Tomcat: I installed the newest version and just copy pasted the <host> sections of the old config file. and copied over the JSPWiki that trekwar.org uses
Mysql: I ditched mysql and instead went for hsqldb, this required some rewriting of the aakretech.com website and the sql stored procedures, which took over an hour.
SVN: This also took about an hour, moving the repository was easy, but had to rebase all the local repositories and generate new ssh-keys and stuff.
Trekwar: An development version which has been running for months was shut down and copied straight over just like Mumble
Misc: Also there were some cron jobs (Like the one that keeps the Trekwar bug list updated), config files and other junk and stuff that had to be moved
DNS: What took up most of the time was sorting out and waiting for DNS stuff, previously I used vps.net’s dns servers but now I had to set up zones both at dynadot.com where my domains are registered, and zoneedit.com where I have some zones (primarily to be able to get mail forwarding at the same time as having a normal A record for aakretech.com). I suspect Dynadot’s DNS manager to not update properly, had to re-edit many of the zones before it took, and I’m still waiting for aakretech.org to go from their DNS to ZoneEdit :/

You can never have too much memory, and yes I named my server after Rudolf Clausius since it’s located in Germany.
Tags: aakretech, Clausius, computer, cron jobs, database, Debian, dedicated server, development, DNS, dns manager, dns servers, domain, dynadot, Germany, hetzner, hsqldb, jsp, jspwiki, linux, mail forwarding, memory, Mumble, mysql, ram, repositories, repository, Rudolf Clausius, server, sql, sql stored procedures, ssh, svn, tomcat, trekwar, virtual server, vps, vps.net, website, zoneedit
Posted in Computers, General | No Comments »
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.

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.
Tags: game, klingon, multiplayer, programming, startrek game, testing, trekwar
Posted in Computers, Games, programming | No Comments »
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).
Tags: API, documentbuilderfactory, dom document, game, implementation, inputstreamreader, java, java implementation, java object, Object, star trek, star trek game, Toodledo, Toodledo api, trekwar, w3c dom, wiki, XML
Posted in Computers, General, programming | No Comments »
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
Tags: Abstractspoon, development, game, great software, Jira, milestone, minecraft, planning, programming, project, scrum, scrum development, software, task, task list, todolist, Toodledo, track, trekwar
Posted in Computers, General, programming | No Comments »
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
Tags: animation, comicon, fog of war, game, map, new job, program, programming, sensor system, star trek, star trek game, Toodledo, Trek, trekwar
Posted in Computers, Games, General, programming | No Comments »
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
Tags: array, boolean, bug, code, Collections, core classes, documention, equals, equals method, example, faction, generics, getName, instanceof, java, java collections, java generics, method, Object, star systems, structure, Trek, trekwar
Posted in Computers, General, programming | No Comments »
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
Tags: cargo, cargo system, cargo transfer, design, deuterium, game, images, implementation, java, ore, programming, resource, ship, star trek, starship, starsystem, starsystems, strategy, the da vinci code, trekwar, ui
Posted in Computers, Games, General, programming | No Comments »
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
Tags: blog, fleet, fog of war, game, map, programming, prototype, sensor system, sensors, star trek, Trek, trekwar
Posted in Computers, Games, General, programming | 1 Comment »
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
The Trekwar Wiki runs on JSPWiki 2.8.1 (which is pretty awesome BTW).
I just reinstalled my OS and had lost the password, and the Wiki is not set up to use email, so I could not reset it by web.
So I had to find a way to do it by console, and a google search did not provide a complete solution, so here it is:
- Log into the server where the Wiki is hosted
- generate your new password (the password in this example is “password” and it’s hash is the green text below, you can use this if you want)
echo -n password | sha1sum
- The command above gives you a “encrypted” password: 5baa61e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8
- The user database in JSPWiki is a xml file that resides in the WEB-APP directory and is called userdatabase.xml
- This file has a simple format, each user has a <user> tag. So just find the user you want to reset the password for
- The user tag has a password filed that looks something like this:
password="{SSHA}XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
Change this to: (remember to use your own password hash if you made one, or use the green one above):
password="{SHA}YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY"
- NOTE: changing from SSHA to SHA
- Log in with your new password (or “password” if you used the green hash above)
- Change your password!
Tags: console, database, encrypted password, jsp, jspwiki, password, reset, sha1, ssha, trekwar, wiki
Posted in Computers, General | No Comments »