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.

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

Code block

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).

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

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

example:

Code block

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

was changed to:

Code block

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.

Code block

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

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

Read full devblog post at trekwar.org

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

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:

1. Log into the server where the Wiki is hosted
2. 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
3. The command above gives you a “encrypted” password: 5baa61e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8
4. The user database in JSPWiki is a xml file that resides in the WEB-APP directory and is called userdatabase.xml
5. This file has a simple format, each user has a <user> tag. So just find the user you want to reset the password for
6. The user tag has a password filed that looks something like this:
   

   Code block

   password="{SSHA}XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

   
   Change this to: (remember to use your own password hash if you made one, or use the green one above):
   

   Code block

   password="{SHA}YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY"

7. NOTE: changing from SSHA to SHA
8. Log in with your new password (or “password” if you used the green hash above)
9. Change your password!
   

This is how I proceeded in locating the memory leak, this method could easily be adapted to other programs.

Trekwar is turn based, so each turn the client downloads a Galaxy object from the server. There are many references to this objects inside action listeners, threads, etc..

WeakReference
To make a long story short, a weak reference is like a normal reference, except it will not prevent the object it points to from being garbage collected.

This means that is you  have a normal and a weak reference to object A, the weak reference will be null if you remove the “hard” reference.

1) In the client main executable (the class that holds the method that updates the map from the server). Import, declare and make a list of weak references

Code block

import java.lang.ref.WeakReference;
private ArrayList<WeakReference<Galaxy>> weakRefs;
 
weakRefs = new ArrayList<WeakReference<Galaxy>>();

2) Find the place in your program where a new object is being added, in my place this is the localGalaxy object. Create a weak reference to this object, and list all your weak references.

Code block

localGalaxy = (Galaxy) objStream.readObject();
weakRefs.add(new WeakReference(localGalaxy));
for(int i = 0; i < weakRefs.size(); i++) {
System.out.print("ref # " + i + " = ");
try {
Galaxy testG = (Galaxy)weakRefs.get(i).get();
System.out.println(testG + ", tick = " + testG.currentTick);
}
catch(NullPointerException npe) {
System.out.println("null");
}
}

And you’re done!

Now when you run the program, you should see something like this each time the method is called

Code block

ref # 0 = org.aakretech.trekwar2.common.Galaxy@11ed166, tick = 37
ref # 1 = org.aakretech.trekwar2.common.Galaxy@9801f4, tick = 37
ref # 2 = org.aakretech.trekwar2.common.Galaxy@1c5d81c, tick = 38
ref # 3 = org.aakretech.trekwar2.common.Galaxy@101f8f4, tick = 39
ref # 4 = org.aakretech.trekwar2.common.Galaxy@1ed1e7e, tick = 40
ref # 5 = org.aakretech.trekwar2.common.Galaxy@e0a7ea, tick = 41

Unless you want to wait until your GC decides it’s time to go, use a tool like VisualVM to force the Garbage Collector to run.

After the GC has run, the output should look like this:

Code block

ref # 0 = null
ref # 1 = null
ref # 2 = null
ref # 3 = null
ref # 4 = null
ref # 5 = null
ref # 6 = org.aakretech.trekwar2.common.Galaxy@2b3c91, tick = 42

Now, this means that the object IS being garbage collected, and there is no memory leak.. If you run this and the object you are monitoring (in this example the localGalaxy object) is not GC’ed because of stray references, you can tell because none of the references will point to null.

ShipDesigner:

Faction Hulls:
x

Chat:

I was planning to implement the ship actions, like colonization and ship combat this easter. But I think I’ll work on the Starsystem management system instead, as I redesigned it heavily this easter.