Rating stars, harmonica menus, submarine sounds and boat-buying bots

Well, I guess the title says it all… First of all, I did some more household cleaning this weekend, sorting pictures neatly in folders by category, separating out frontend files by page, etc. Nothing fancy, just the kind of stuff that needed to be done sometime and you can’t ignore forever or your code becomes unworkable.

Now for the fun stuff. I got sick of the boring map 2 player basic always showing up first when creating a game. I am sure that puts a lot of people of because it’s so boring compared to, say, Chokehole! or Treasure Island. So I wanted a better way to sort the presented maps in, and as usual the tweak came with a feature: map ratings!

Obviously you have seen these a thousand times and ignored them, which is fine because I just wanted them as an excuse to place my favourite maps on top of the cue:

Map ratings

I don’t take any credit since I took them from Beau Scot, and that file is really a good example of a simple, clean, efficient and maximum reusable little javaScript class (thx to Prototype of course).

Next, I revamped the menu in the portal a bit, including a subtle but (I believe) gigantic useability step forward: allowing the user to choose between single- or multiplayer before creating a game. Number of bots is chosen automatically now, and even better: when you start a multiplayer game an invitation is posted in the portal chat for the others!

The portal is still traditionally ugly, but I can’t believe it took me so long to make that part of the experience a bit more pleasant. There was really no excuse for the earlier game creation process (i.e. creating game, leaving it to come back at the portal to tell the others the game id …).

And finally, as usual these days, some more bot enhancing: they can now also buy naval units, the code behind them is a bit cleaner with even more ‘behavior’ parameters separated out.

Among the tweakable bot-settings we now have these two: landUnitCountBeforeConsideringNaval and unitCountBeforeConsideringBuilding. Of course in a later phase it would be neat to make these depend both on bot ‘character’  and on the map and/or the number of enemy units.

But the best of all is of course that the submarine now makes bubble sounds when moving/firing!