How good are you?

Think you're a good Zilcher?  Any games that you finish will now count towards your Zilch rank.  The scoring is outlined on the page but you get points for playing against anybody, and win or lost points for playing against other Playr account holders.

So make sure you login to your account before you play, build your Zilch rank and let the gloating begin :)

G.

Updates

I've made a few tasty tweaks to the engine now, mainly fixing some bugs and adding a few new features to the client before I update the server.  Now I have added:

• Wings!  You'll only see them if you're playing against me
• Instant rematch option.  I was getting fed up of having to start new games every time so I added a "play again" button to just play the same person again.  Very handy
• Lobby happening in the background.  It was still making pops and noises and stuff whilst playing, that has been fixed
• Some menu improvements.  Tweaks made to the logic of the menu screens has improved them a little.
• Server enhancements.  Games are now handled more efficiently on the server.

I'm sure there's other stuff but that's the things I can remember, I'm sure there are more.

Today I have played against one Mexican, three Canadians, a Californian currently living in Italy and 2 people from London.  Oh, and one guy from Ireland too.

It Is Online

NetZilch is here!  Why not have a few games with a friend?

G.

Beta Progress

Thanks to the feedback from the beta testing team I have managed to iron out a few more bugs in the NetZilch code, some of which were quite serious showstoppers:

• Games failing to start.  This was because the game didn't have a list of players and this caused some... issues.
• Lobby games not going away.  I have restructured the way the lobby receives instructions from the server so this works better now
  
• Game passwords.  There was a mismatch between the text restrictions on the game creation password field and the game joining password field.  They have now been standardised.
• Opponent scores.  You can now click on an opponent's score sheet to see their tabulated scores.
• Help panels.  Now the help panels should all go away when you click on any of their "ok" buttons.
• Lobby breaking.  When the last player logs out, the lobby scope gets deleted and therefore link to the lobby shared object is lost.  I've now tweaked the server to recreate the lobby if it's not already running and attach a shared object to it properly
• Better server code.  I have made a number of structural and functional improvements to the server side code, namely the ApplicationAdaptor that runs the main lobby has been drastically simplified, proper usage of the roomJoin() and roomLeave() methods makes life easier and the general feeling of understanding has increased.
• Single 5 not being added.  If you rolled 1115 or 5551 or any combination of 3+ of a kind and some 1's or 5's, the extra dice were not being added to your score.  This was a glitch both parts of the engine code, server and client side.
• More legible chat window.  Fixed the font sizes to be the same, moved the text box a little bit and made the text optimised for readability rather than animation.

I'm sure there might be a few things that I've left off this list but that's all that I can think of at the moment.  I've been working quite hard on this for the last few days, I expect this to continue for the next week or so.

To all you beta testers (you know who you are), thank you!  Keep testing, keep playing, keep sending in bug reports.  If I might suggest, give the beta test login details to a few friends and ask them to login at 9pm, local time.  Have a few games, see if you can find a few bugs.  Who knows, you might even see me online... :)

G.

Beta Testers Wanted

Fancy testing out the online 2 player version of Zilch? It's pretty much ready to rock but I do need a body of sensible people with a few friends who are willing to put the network game through it's paces. It's pretty much the same as the single player game but you get to play online with your friends. You can even have a little chat with them using the in-game chat. How sweet :)

So what can you do?  The first dozen or so people who express interest by leaving a comment to this post will get a password for the beta test area.  You should then arrange a time with a friend to both login at the same time and have a few games of NetZilch.  If you find a bug then you should do this:

1. Check it's actually a bug.  See if it's doing something you don't expect it to do or something that it actually shouldn't do.
2. Try and make the bug repeat itself.  If you can't make the bug happen at will, I won't be able to make it happen at will and therefore can't fix it.
3. Get in touch, explaining what the bug is and, in as much details as possible, how I can make this bug happen for me.

I can't emphasise point 3 enough, if you don't tell me how to repeat the bug then I can't fix it.

If you're still interested then drop me a comment and I'll zip you access to the beta test.  First come first served!

G.

Quiet, but not forgotten

Yes, I have been rather quiet of late but fear not, I am still in active development.  I am putting the final, long awaited touches to Net Zilch after a somewhat prolonged absence from coding.  So gird your loins, lock up your daughters, don't forget your toothbrush and brace yourself, Net Zilch is almost ready!

In other news, it was my birthday a few weeks ago!  I have made it to the sturdy age of thirty (dirty thirty).  Go me!

Merry Christmas!

And a happy new year to all you wonderul playr people out there :)

Here's to another bug free year of games and fun.

Fond regards,

G.

Sneak peek: Multiplayer

And here's another little sneak peak of a UI change.  Can you see what it is?

That's right, the roll button is transparent.  And there's a tiny little iconised menu at the foot of the screen as well.  I was fed up with the nasty menus that I had, thought I'd try out my paltry artistic skillz.  Ah well, at least it's in keeping with the hand-scrawled feel of the game :)

Upcoming version sneak peek

Here's a little graphic that shows a working version of Zilch that I have in progress. I have it set to play 3 CPU players against each other to a million points, just to see what would happen:

There will be a few changes to the dice graphics and as you can see all the player's scores are now visible at the same time.  Support has always been there for an arbitrary number of players, I hope to be able to extend the UI to let you play with more than 2 people.

The main changes are under the hood; all the game logic has been separated from the game controller.  The problem with just trying to build a game means that in the rush to get it built you don't really think about what should go where.  At some point you need to add a new feature (multiplayer support, for example) and everything suddenly gets very complicated.  I hit this point last week and I've spent the last 4 days refactoring everything to be much cleaner, simpler, more event driven and vastly less complex.  The upshot of this will be that it will turn the multiplayer integration from a nightmare to merely a complicated problem.  Sweet.

So, at some point soon multiplayer gaming will be ready to rock.  I'll put some screen shots of that up when I finally get my sanity back :)

Zilch spotted in the wild

I've found Zilch in a number of popular blogs on the internets:

• Metafilter
• Jay Is Games
• One More Level

To name a couple.  I'm so chuffed that it has taken off and I'm glad that the majority of the feedback is positive :)

If you've seen Zilch featured on a blog or review site, drop me a comment, I'll add it to the list.