ROE Online - The Programming Effort

[X-Hermedhie (Ronny)]

Map views(google map view?):
- Provinces with name of each province
- Political different colored realms based on owner gathered from P&H
- Roads view with trade routes, ley lines etc.
- All provinces on the map should have levels gathered from P&H e.g. 7/3
- Status view maybe, with prosperity using color codes from red(baaaad) to green(live long and prosper!)

[X-Tornilen/SM (Alexander)]

Here is what I would suggest:
- Create a relational database containing all the information currently in the P&H.
- Create an interface for that database that allows for all the operations the dm needs to perform:
-- Increasing/decreasing holding levels, changing province ownership, changing prosperity, etc.
- The same interface can be used to pull out reports
-- A full report in a format than can easily be made into a spreadsheet. In effect I want the database to be able to print out the current P&H. However, I also want it to be possible to pull out a report of a specific realm, province and so on. Again, both in a format that can easily be read by excel/openoffice (or something like it), and in a nice readable format.
- The database should also contain armies, their location and their status... as well as structures and so on. Ie. EVERYTHING.

... And that's pretty much it. A nice, structured database, possibly a program for interacting with it that is modular in design - so things like actual turn handling can be added on later.

A few things I think should go into this:
RoE will eventually end, I imagine someone might start another game at that point... rules are likely to be changed. Therefore everything should be modular and easily replaceable.
RoE might spawn the occasional "child" game - This is the most alive Birthright community I know of, with the possible exception of Leicester. This is as likely a growing garden for new Birthright related PbEM's as any.

Speaking of the Leicester community. People need to take a look at BirMail
http://birmail.sourceforge.net/
It essentially has everything that Niller just suggested, as well as the functionality to create a ready Birthright PBEM homepage that is very high quality. The only drawback... it implements the 2nd edition rules. THey are fairly hardwired into the program, but I think it might be a goldmine for ideas.

Even further, getting in touch with the people making the new generation of this program might be valuable. They are designing it for 2nd edition rules (the Leicester community is like that), but certain parts of it... such as the basic database and everything I mentioned above, could be made so it could be used for both original rules and the RoE rules.

[X-Tornilen/SM (Alexander)]

Small correction: No one is currently working on the BRMail project. It appears to be dead, though the program is still in use. It is quite neat, a lot of effort went into it... would be nice if we could reuse parts of it, assuming that is easier than building it from the ground up.

[X-Medoere & RCS/KE (Thorsten)]

Other games have similar projects.

I would venture that by building on something else you risk setting yourself in stone as to how things should work, or finding yourself forced to do things in ways you don't wanted it.

[X-Tornilen/SM (Alexander)]

You are most likely right. The structure of that program can be used as inspiration, but no code or database can be "scavenged" from it, not directly anyway. It would be nice though, to have some of the documentation from it - to see how they organized it. Trying to build or mod a project 6 years gone would be... insane

[X-Elinie/RiD (Niels)]

Guys, we are in brainstorming mode here.

Get on your blue hats and dream. Limitations and scope comes later. 

[X-Elinie/RiD (Niels)]

Oh! Of course!

Dispatch facilities. Person to group, like mini specialized forums that can be set up by a player when picking the domains the communicate to.

Counting letters, ability to click-through to all letters from a specific realm, all series where a specific realm was receiving etc.

While we are at it, correct titles and address guides could be part of it. You pick the domains to send to, and their heads along with suggested appropriate address is pasted into the note. Fairly simple, but pretty nifty.

[X-Ghieste & HOT/GH (Matt)]

What can I do? I invent - I create customer experiences and user interfaces and then take them to market. I cannot code but I can test and break and suggest better ways to present and support your users....

yeah I am probably useless

[bluntaxe]

I still have VB.NET BR program that I worked on years ago.  It uses an Access database, so that could still be used as a base for whatever else might happen.  The VB program I believe was somewhat functional (i know the army stuff wasn't fully functional). 

I have the program and source code if anyone is interested, when I worked on it, I had ROE in mind so some of the ROE stuff is in it (at least the rules as they existed at that time).  Unfortunately, I don't have a .NET anymore, so its not something I can really work on/update at this time.  Just wanted to offer what I have in case anyone wanted it.....

[X-Elinie/RiD (Niels)]

The new excel DO really helped a lot, and its also great as a template for a programmed solution.

Is someone has the ability to recreate the DO in code, based on data pulled from a clone of the P&H, then we are much further.

I still have an ambition of writing a "business requirements" type of document, RL time has just not been friendly recently.

[X-Elinie/RiD (Niels)]

First Step:

Create a single table that reflects all the variables used to describe a single province pr. row and a screen UI that displays this.

Second step:

Add the income and other calculations to the pr. province view, pr. domain ruler represented in each. - Dynamic calculated values, not necessarily requiring more DB fields.

Third step:
Create a view showing a set of specific provinces, which provinces to be shown should be drawn from a field pr. province call "Nation"

Income, RP and GB, is now shown aggregated pr. ruler across all provinces in the Nation.

- This step is the direct equivalent to the nation page of the P&H

Fourth step:
Yet another view, based on another province field called "Region"

Fifth:
Another view, based on the rulers of holdings across provinces. - So a ruler can be singled out and displayed.

This is just stream of thought...

[Davout]

First let me say, I realize that I'm the new guy. I don't want to come off as some jerk telling everyone how things should be done.
 

First Step:

Create a single table that reflects all the variables used to describe a single province pr. row and a screen UI that displays this.

When you say table do you mean database table? If so I would suggest against a single table. I know province will have least one one-to-many relationship. Ex: A province can have multiple holdings of a given type.

What is pr. ?

Thanks.

[X-Elinie/RiD (Niels)]

Yes, its more than one table. I got there my self when I was at the end of the post, but I had to skip off to work and did not have time to clarify. :-)

"pr." is an abbreviation that is local to Danish it seems. Its short for "per", used like this:

- Without it: Give each man one.
- With it: Give one per man.

[X-Elinie/RiD (Niels)]

I've made some preliminary ideas to the tables needed to describe a province at the most basic level.

The holdings table will just be a huge list of lines. Each "hit" when looking either at the Ruler_ID or the Prov_ID will indicate one level of the holding type in question.

The ball is in the air I suppose.

[Davout]

Thanks I'll take a look.

My suggestion of next steps:

• Designate a person (Bjorn would be my guest) or small group of people to act as final arbitrators. Yes we want the system to be as flexible as possible but some things will just require a decision one way or another.
• Get answers to two fundamental questions:
      a. open vs closed source
          Open advantages:
              More options of where to host code repository
              Increase chance of getting additional help
          Closed advantages:
              Is there any GM only secrets that the software would handle?
      b. platform: web vs desktop
• Gather functional requirements as a set of user stories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story. We have a good start on this thread. I would like one more go around. All design decisions will follow from this.