Any Programmers Looking for a Challenging Project?

[Tynion]

You're right, of course. But I guess that's why I titled this topic 'Challenging Project' and you responded.

However, I don't think that a project such as this can be successful if I don't hold high expectations and standards. I mean.. we would "only" need to compete with MTGO.

Just so you know, I was not knocking your work, so please don't take it that way. Even though the interface looked "eh", I kept playing it trying to best the AI. As a matter of fact, your AI was more skilled than most of the humans that I have played over the years (started in 1994). So don't take that as an attack. It wasn't intended to be that way.

I guess what I was thinking was... if only I could get the appearance of Incantus with the AI and functionality of Forge.

[MageKing17]

I guess what I was thinking was... if only I could get the appearance of Incantus with the AI and functionality of Forge.

Incantus's UI is open source, go ahead and see if you can copy the function of it... or improve it.

[silly freak]

you (or someone of the "technical guys" on your team) really need to settle on an aproach. You talked about adapting Incantus, but also about the game being browser-based, which doesn't sound very compatible. I don't know how hard it would be to adapt incantus to be the server side of a web game, but it sure takes much work. Plus, incantus' foundation might not be robust/secure etc enough for that job. (i don't know anything about incantus, but those are very important for web applications)

my guess is, since you're wanting to do a lot of social networking, take the browser. the fact that users a very familiar with using browsers to communicate is a big plus on it own.

then again, i'm not very familiar with web applications. I wish you good luck with it!

[Incantus]

Actually, I've been thinking about how difficult it would be to port Incantus's engine to javascript, and from what I've read about js it seems that the port would be pretty straightfoward and most concepts would map without much changes.

[Huggybaby]

I'm not a fan of java, but judging from Forge's success you might get a lot of programming help if you did use that language.

[Tynion]

what is an example of a program using javascript?

[silly freak]

hmm... most websites. Anything where you can not just click links and go to a new page to get an effect, but also, for example, use mouseover (like the quick reply button or card detail here: Llanowar Elves). Famous examples are social network sites or webmail clients.

But note that Javascript is only a client-side (speak: browser) technology. On your server, you have another technology, like php, jsp, asp etc.

But is the language decision really what you want to do right now? I thought you were not even sure about what kind of application, web or standalone, you want to make. only when you have decided on this, you can think about the other. And the language decision is probably one for your programmers, because it really depends on their individual skills.

@Huggybaby: out of curiosity, what do you not like about java? I have wished once or twice to have pointers, or more control over object initialization, but in most points, it's a good language with well-designed APIs, right?

[Huggybaby]

@Huggybaby: out of curiosity, what do you not like about java? I have wished once or twice to have pointers, or more control over object initialization, but in most points, it's a good language with well-designed APIs, right?

I can only speak from an end user's perspective, not from a coder's perspective, however: I don't like that Java needs to be installed for a Java app to work. Java tends to be (but is not necessarily) slow and resource hungry (see Vuze (Azureus) vs uTorrent), and from what I've read many simple things in Java take a lot of code to implement.

I prefer apps written in machine language, but there aren't too many of those! They are tiny and fast as hell. I know they aren't cross-platform and are hard to write, but like I said, this is from a user's POV so I don't have to consider all that.

[Incantus]

hmm... most websites. Anything where you can not just click links and go to a new page to get an effect, but also, for example, use mouseover (like the quick reply button or card detail here: Llanowar Elves). Famous examples are social network sites or webmail clients.

Javascript is a full blown language, with much of the same power as python and ruby. People are doing much more with javascript in the browser than simple mouseover effects. For example, Cappuccino is a port of apple's cocoa framework to javascript - see this demo of http://280slides.com/Editor/. Also, some people at google have ported Quake 2 to run in javascript on the browser (using WebGL for hardware acceleration and other HTML 5 goodies that will be showing up soon on modern browsers) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSDiBA27Wo0

But note that Javascript is only a client-side (speak: browser) technology. On your server, you have another technology, like php, jsp, asp etc.

That used to be true, but now there are server-side frameworks that are written in javascript, so you can have your full stack in javascript (for the latest example, see node.js - http://nodejs.org/). And with google/mozilla throwing so much effort into fast interpretation of javascript on the client side that's sure to help server side javascript.