Kinsman Games  

All right, it’s out.

CotG Desktop 2

Well – when I started getting messages that the old CotG Desktop was having trouble running, I realized that it was probably due to conflicts caused by Flash Player 10 starting to make the rounds on most people’s computers.

That’ll happen sometimes. A program gets old after a while – not because of anything it did, but because of the surrounding environment – a changed OS, a few different dependencies, and the program breaks.

So, I knew I had to make a new version of CotG Desktop.

But ah! I’ve actually been working on one for a long time now! Which means that the new version won’t just be a “repaired” version of 1.1.3 – rather, you’re going to get a brand new program with all sorts of features!

Let’s make a list:

Adobe AIR. Rather than being a Flash engine wrapped in a Windows program, the new desktop uses Adobe’s own official way of delivering Flash to a desktop application – Adobe AIR.

Adobe AIR is a framework, much like Java or .NET – and its specialty is taking web programming techniques (i.e. writing in either Javascript, or Flash) and giving them the ability to work on the desktop in full-fledged desktop applications.

The upshot of all this? You can run CotG Desktop 2 on either Windows, Macs, or Linux machines.

Roster Tag Filtering. CotG Desktop 2 now has a simple tagging system.  Instead of hunting alphabetically through your hundred and some wrestlers, you can type some tags in a box at the bottom, and have the list filtered to ones that match the tags you’ve given those wrestlers.

You can filter either positively or negatively – for instance, “cpc male -manager” gives you all your male CPC characters, except the ones that are managers.

If you’ve ever had trouble running multiple federations in CotG Desktop, tagging will make life easier.  You can switch federations just by switching the main tag that you filter by.

Random summoning respects filters, too.  For instance, if you want to have a run-in by a wrestler’s ally, then just filter by the stable of that wrestler, click the Totals line at the top and boom – random ally wrestler!

Triggers. When I looked CotG Online, Filsinger Games’s own Desktop spinoff, one of the features I liked was the ability to click on one of the wrestler’s situation-grades, and have the appropriate chart pop up and rolled on.

It was great automation, and I wanted something like it – but I had to be careful, because I wanted to keep the program rule-neutral; make sure people who made custom rules didn’t get left out.

My solution was “triggers”.  When you roll on a wrestler’s offense or defense charts, the program does a text search on the result – and if it matches a pre-defined trigger you’ve set up, the appropriate chart pops up automatically.

For instance, you can match “into the ropes” for your Into The Ropes chart – obviously.  But, suppose you had custom rules attached to Add 1 moves.  Make a trigger for “Add 1″, and your custom chart pops up whenever an Add 1 move occurs.

Improved Sheets. “Sheets” and “Charts” are now the same thing in CotG Desktop – collections of text, charts, and/or other devices.  A single sheet can have some opening commentary, and then be followed with either a single chart, or all the charts and sub-charts you might want in one place.

There’s even the ability to make “card decks” that you can draw randomly from – and the engine behind the Sheets feature is robust enough that more devices are sure to follow in future versions.

Improved Backgrounds. In the old version, you had a fixed list of background images, and one slot that you had to make yourself, name ‘custom.jpg’, and drop in the right folder.  Now, you can just open any JPG or PNG file you please, and either stretch, tile, or center it as your background, without fuss.

New Card Look-and-Feel. I fussed over this, trying to figure out what I could do to improve the workflow.  Buttons for manipulating the card have moved, into what I feel are handier places – and they’ve gotten out of each other’s way now, hopefully avoiding those errors where you closed a card when you wanted to do something else.  Extra rules for a card are overlaid on top with a button click, instead of hanging off the bottom.  Minimizing a card is done by shift-clicking, and simply hides the bottom while leaving the non-movelist stats all readable.

So, when is this coming out?  Well, it’s nearly done – I have the documentation to write, and some polishing to do, but it’ll be out in just a few days, and maybe even sooner than that!

PitSweeper

I’ve had this idea for a few years now. The idea started out as a way to make roguelike games have a more streamlined and elegant interface; usually, roguelikes have a long list of key commands, and I wanted to see if I could make the most common ones into mouse commands and leave the rest to simple menus.

The idea changed over time (PitSweeper, in the end, doesn’t have enough to do to be a good example of simplifying roguelike controls.) I was thinking about Minesweeper, and thought it would be fun to make a roguelike that was quick to learn, and used the mystery of not knowing what was underneath a tile to add to the game.

..stop playing so much Smash Brothers.

Lately, I’ve been getting some e-mails; people have been downloading and installing CotG Desktop, but they’ve having trouble running it. They report that the dice continually flash, the background is screwed up, and they can’t make the program do anything.

Either they had this problem from the start, or this problem began once they had upgraded to the latest version of Flash on their computers.

CotG Desktop uses Flash to display its graphical UI; in fact, the whole program is Flash, with a simple Windows wrapper that lets it do things like read and write files. I had thought that the program could account for and survive Flash updates – and I think it did manage to survive a few version changes – but now, it’s time is up, and Flash has gotten too new and fancy for this old program.

That happens with programs once they’ve been around for a few years; they get a little old, they don’t look as polished as applications with a more recent/evolved UI – and then finally the OS, or some necessary internal component gets too far ahead of them and the application stops even being compatible.

So – it looks like, at least, I’m going to have to make a new version of CotG Desktop that doesn’t have the incompatibility program.

It could be a simple update; however, I’ve been tinkering with the code of CotG Desktop for a while now, adding features here and there. I’ve been using the test bed of code for my own personal federation, and I thought to myself that “someday”, I’d have to finish it up and show everyone what I’ve made.

But, if the old program is getting so old that it’s bugging out, I’ll have to release my work sooner than later. I’m busy with another project at the moment, a Flash game – but once it’s done, I can focus on finishing and polishing up CotG Desktop 2.0.

So, if you’re having trouble, my apologies – and hang in there. I’ll have another post previewing the new version later.