Daring Apprentice

I was contacted today an admin of the people over at http://www.slightlymagic.net to create a forum for DA... Which can now be found at: http://www.slightlymagic.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=49

In addition he told me about this link: http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=56796

But for now I will not add DA there, because net play is not featured. Hopefully as I said in the slightlymagic forum... it'll be here "real soon".

Now that Facebook has changed pages to be like profiles... You can now upload your screenshots onto the Daring Apprentice page. Obviously, you need to be a member, and you must not abuse it with screenshots of yourself! Just screenshots of the game.

My brother is a level 2 judge, and he has used screenshots in a rules questions posed to other judges. So maybe if you want to ask that tricky rules question, or discuss a play situation... Like would you attack here? Or how would you assign blockers?

Enjoy!

Well, this post is all about how I am programming the networks, and hopefully, how I think I am being "smart". Hopefully it doesn't all backfire into my face.

First of all... the way that the server and the client will be "sending" messages will be very, very similar. Thus, if the messages what they send will be similar, so will the messages they receive. The BIG difference comes in how they respond once the message is received.

For instance. The Client will request "DrawCard","Library" (Because I want the commands to look similar I added Library... Library is actually "Implied" with "DrawCard".) Then the server will send a reply "DrawCard","Forest"... In this case the "implied" position (the hand) is not used. So the message sent was the same, but the server will respond differently than the client will...

So what I've done to help me code cleanly, and hopefully smartly, is I've used the Lazarus feature of "including" files. So my generic send code can be used (NetSend.inc) for both the server and the client... both have "command","parameter" sending, it's just that the client is saying "DrawCard","Library", whilst the server is saying "DrawCard","Forest"... but they both use the exact (letter for letter) same code.

Even the receiving (NetReceive.inc) code can be reused, up to the point where the *interpretation* of "DrawCard" needs to happen. That then is seperated into the server's code, and the Client's code.

It does mean though that I'll have some "dead" commands on both sides... like "RequestNewTable"... the Server won't be sending a table request back... It does something else. This is few and far between though, so hopefully not too many dead alleys in my code.

Looking forward to hopefully be able to do some connecting to tables, and talking away soon. (And after that... who knows? Drawing and playing cards!)

If anyone who's using a newish version of DA, can email me a screenshot (where the opponent hand is inside the main window) I'll much appreciate it. Or you can just replace it on the wiki directly.

Thanks!