[Visionaries] Re: A hint of Sourcery in the air

[Peter Minten]

Peter Minten wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I decided to reactivate Sourcery as the example project for DG-Scheme 
> and Forum. I also decided to reform some things to fully use the power 
> of DG-Scheme and make the game more fun (read more complex :-).

Some more rules.

It's possible to play a piece hidden by putting it in a box. A box effectively 
hides it's contents, it's not perfect however and details of it's contents may 
leak out (for example that the attack power of the piece in it is bigger than 
10). The capabilities of a piece in a box is also limited, most pieces simply 
don't do anything in a box. A box can be opened on demand by a trigger, this is 
often useful to set traps.

An example of the use of boxing:
   +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
 9 |   |   |   | b | S | S |   |   |   |   |
   +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
 8 |   |   | g |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
   +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
 7 |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
   +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
 6 |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
   +===+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+
 5 |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
   +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
 4 |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
   +===+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+
 3 |   |   | c |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
   +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
 2 |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
   +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
 1 |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
   +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
 0 |   |   |   |   | S | S |   |   |   |   |
   +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
     A   B   C   D   E   F   G   H   I   J

The creature at c3 has attack range 5 (very high), attack power 20 (also quite 
high) and defense power 15, the generator at c8 has defense power 10. White is 
going to do c3xc8 (c3 attacks c8). Black has put in the on-attack trigger of 
it's generator that it's box at d9 will open and activate. The box of d9 
contains a 1 turn mirror spell (mirror spells are attack reflectors) with 
defense range 1. Thus c3 attacks c8, but d9 opens and activates reflecting the 
attack of c3 to c3, since 20>15 c3 destroys itself. How very pleasant for black :-).

If d9 wasn't in a box the trap would have been obvious to white and thus white 
wouldn't have attacked but rather have waited, playing more pieces (for example 
a very weak creature to sacrifice in order to disarm the trap).

Sourcery has a quite intelligent category system. An example of a category is 
'fire'. Categories are simple classes without prototypes (abstract classes). A 
piece belongs in a category if it interface inherits the category class.

The board squares have terrain which influences the game. The terrain is made by 
the game engine, but can, of course, be manipulated by pieces. Terrain is 
usually about the high level categories (for example 'fire', not 'white dragon 
baby with hickup') and only influences the game in a very basic way, adding and 
substracting attack, defense and move points. Piece templates (piece classes) 
can however create their own reaction to the terrain in addition to the existing 
terrain effect, so the effect of terrain can be neutralized, increased or a new 
effect (like that you can't cast a certain spell at a certain terrain) can be added.

Now to the game internals. Sourcery is a client-server webservice application 
that can run either under DGEE or standalone. The webservice calls will be very 
basic, mostly YAML strings. The choice for YAML allows easy debugging of the 
calls, great protocol independance since strings can be send over by any RPC 
protocol and besides YAML is one of the core technologies of DG-Scheme and 
Sourcery is an example project :-).

The basic Sourcery game will probably have a chat room and stuff integrated, 
effectively giving it similar functionality as Forum. Later when Forum is ready 
  the game will become a real Forum app. The advantage of this approach is that 
Sourcery doesn't have to wait for Forum and that I have a good, testing 
situation for the Forum technology.

Greetings,

Peter