Wednesday, July 29

Sumeria V0.1

Well, the whole trying to run this through BoardGameGeek thing didn't work very well - it's down at the moment :-(

So I'll do it here instead. The first version of the Sumeria computer game is now available (ish!) on my website: Sumeria computer game with any luck if you download that MSI file and then run it, it will install Sumeria on your computer.

First a few provisos. This is a very early version to get some feedback about the user interface - very little actually works yet. What does work:

  • You can install it
  • You can start a new game from the Game menu
  • You can choose the number of players, their names and the colours they play.
  • You can highlight a state by moving the mouse over its tile
  • You can set up the game by seeding the board with the appropriate number of traders.

What doesn't work? Anything else! Most notably you can't play the game. There's no AI and you can't get the game to work across the internet with remote players - it's three or four humans around the one computer.

The next release will incorporate feedback on this one and allow you to play the game on a single machine with no AI.

I'd really appreciate any feedback you have on what I've done so far - in the comments here for until BGG is back up.

10 comments:

Todd said...

Can't run it. It thinks I need the "Net Framework" which I already have installed.

One thought --just randomly assign player colors... err "colours". No need to add the choice of which color you get.

Jackson Pope said...

Hiya Todd,

Interesting. You'll need .Net Framework v1.1 - which version have you got installed?

Regarding colours, it does assign them automatically, but you can change them if you want (I for one always play yellow and get very confused if I'm not playing yellow!).

Cheers,

Jack

Mal said...

You can move the mouse into a different city-state and the highlight won't follow you until you hover over one of the new city-state's towns.

Do I win a prize for first bug report, or are you going to claim it's by design? ;)

Mal said...

Also, a wishlist: gentle fade-in / fade-out for the highlighting. I'm gonna trigger some latent epilepsy over here at this rate. ;)

Avantman42 said...

Wine doesn't like it :(

If I remember right, a .msi is an installer file. I don't suppose I could get the straight exe, dll etc files in zip?

Russ

Custancia said...

Not connected to the game - but I've just noticed that there is no (obvious) direct link to your Reiver Games site from your blog. There's links to other sites/ blogs - but not your site...

Jackson Pope said...

@Mal: Number one was intentional, so not a bug as such. I'll think about how I could do a fade...

@Custancia: Good point - I'll fix that!

@Avantman: I'll send you a link to a zip file via email.

Cheers,

Jack

Avantman42 said...

I couldn't wait, so I installed it on our test Windows Server 2003 box at work ;-)

I'd like to be able to maximise and resize the window. The system I tested it on had a resolution of 1024x768, and the window was *just* too tall to show the title bar and status bar simultaneously, unless I hid the task bar.

The window appears to be resizeable - the bottom-right corner has a marking that looks like it indicates it can be resized.

The uninstall appears to remove *all* the installed files, which (from my memory of Windows installers) is unusual, but welcome.

Unknown said...

Haven't followed this blog for the last two months, so it's nice to see that things are developping around Sumeria :-)

Jackson Pope said...

I've been a bit too busy to do much on the computer version of Sumeria recently, but I am making slow progress!

The 2-player expansion is coming on nice though.

Cheers,

Jack