What the heck, I went ahead and scheduled the tournament. I hope some of you are interested in playing. I think it could be a lot of fun. Hopefully it won’t be too much trouble to coordinate the playing in public rooms over at yahoo, we’ll have to see how it goes. Maybe we can make it a regular occurrence.
Well, I’m bummed. I really wanted to host a tournament between the members here. I thought that I would be able to do it on yahoo, but you have to be an all star member there not only to create tournaments, but to play in them too. I can’t seem to find any games site where we could do it for free. If anybody knows of any, please let me know.
Perhaps if there’s any interest, we could hold it in public game rooms on yahoo, and then just keep track of the bracket separately on this site.
Thanks to some great comments on the board position, I’ve made a few changes that might make them a little better.
The cards used here are licensed under the GPL, which basically means that anyone is allowed to distribute or modify the licensed content, as long as they don’t further restrict the rights to the users receiving the distribution, and that they have access to the source code of the content in human readable form.
I got them from this site: http://waste.org/~oxymoron/cards/ They’re quite well done and about the best looking cards I could find that were freeely available. The only difference is that the ace of spaces has the letters GPL in it, and the joker is not the usual joker, it’s the GNU penguin (which we don’t use on the site). Since the GPL permits modification, I could have filled in the GPL on the ace legally, but I chose not to do so since the author put a lot of time into making them, and he was kind enough to make them freely available, that I thought it would be rude to not spread awareness about the GPL.
Well, I took a crack at generating a board position for the hand. Here’ the algorithm I used to get it:
For the first score, choose randomly between:
1. Close enough to peg it in,
2. Close enough to count and peg it in
3. Getting close to the 2nd range
4. None of the above
Once one of those categories has been chosen, it picks a random number in the range for the our score. For the opponents score, if 1,2 or 3 was used, then randomly choose between 1,2 and 3 and pick a number in the range, otherwise randomly pick a number in the last range. Lastly, if the difference between the scores generated was greater than 50, do the whole thing again.
Let me know what you guys think! (The asterisk in the score signifies the dealer, and our score is always the first score)
It seems the spammers have finally found us. Took them long enough. If it keeps up I’ll have to put something in. At least it won’t show any images or links. I don’t know if anyone noticed, but any markup is stripped from the comments before being posted.
Well, the upgrade is complete. I learned a new meaning for the term feature creep. I had to hold back with all the good ideas I had since I was spending far more time than I wanted to with it. Still, I’m happy with the outcome. I hope you guys like the new site design, I even made the graphic myself : ) Feel free to make suggestions or criticism
You can register and log in now, and the server will display your name along with your lifetime vote count when you make a comment. It also shows which hand you picked, so your comment will make a little more sense to the rest of us. And I put in a new sited design with cool a cool html bar chart for the results. That’s about it, sad to say it took me about two weeks, but I also changed the backend entirely to use a database instead of flat files as it was before, since I think that was the culprit for the erroneous cards on occasion.
Bear with me if the road is rocky for the first day or two, but I think it will be fine : )
Apparently there has been a bug in the yesterday’s results page since the inception of this modest website. It always shows the upcard from today, not yesterday. Thanks to the user who finally noticed. Hopefully the upgrade I should be putting up this weekend will be bug free, though I find it unlikely since I seem to prefer to develop rather than test : )
Ben suggested having a board position with the hand. I like the idea, I think it would make the hand much more interesting. Of course, I don’t know exactly how to do it. If I randomize it completely it will be lame half the time. Perhaps we could have a list of interesting positions and then choose from that:
Maybe the list could look like this: Start of the game, Opponent within 10 behind by 2, Within 1 ahead by 2, Down by 5 opponent within 20. I’m kind of liking that idea, I think it’s worth developing if you guys are at all interested. Let me know what you think.
Some users have reported a bug where the last card in the hand doesn’t show up, leaving only a broken link. I can’t seem to reproduce this problem or find anything that might cause it. I’ve turned on php logging so if it happens again let me know and I’ll be able to diagnose a bit better. Until then, the best thing to do is refresh and see if it shows up.