SE306:Group 3:Minutes:Week 1 (23 July)

Minutes

Meeting 1 - Wednesday 23rd July, 11:00am - 12:00pm

Structuring Discussions

Minute Takers

• Shruthi and Katherine will share minute-taking duties, alternating between meetings. Minutes will be posted on this wiki following each meeting.

Issues surrounding Secrecy

• No major code or thief-able ideas to be posted here, only minutes, reducing probability of idea theft :P.
• Possibility of external location to store more 'sensitive' information.

Experience

• Most members of the team have little/no experience with turn-based game engines, therefore we are all on equalish footing :).

Basic Ideas Discussed

Danver's Drawings on Board (:P)

//TODO

Implementation Discussion

• Data to be stored outside matches will include something like a player object, which will consist of playerid, pword, username, name, total games played, games won (and possibly rank, calculated from this information).
• Several methods of implementing the moving of a unit/piece/object when it is not a player's turn were discussed, the 3 main ideas were:
  • Server sends possible moves to all players, any player can move to any of the available new positions, however only the active player can submit the new configuration and change the board state.
  • "Ghost Pieces" where one user (who isn't taking their turn) can experiment with moves, but the object being moved will appear semi-transparent.
  • More of a dialogue type model.

//TODO

Stuff That Should be Worked on First

• Setting up of database
• Diagrams of system (UML etc)
• Paper prototyping of interface (not engine >_>)
  • Who creates the interface? It was decided that we should, but it should be separated from the turn based game engine.
  • Interface will be for things such as log in, create account, lobby.

Ports

• While Danver discussed the idea of one for each game, it was pointed out that many major games only use one to host multiple games, and it would not make sense to use one for each when there is the potential for a huge number of games to be running at once. Hence it was decided only one is required to manage all connections.
• The number decided on is 6112 - coincidentally the same port used for WCIII.

Team and Game Engine Names

• Team Name - GWeb (Short for Game Web, of course)
• Engine Name - Clockwork

Things to Ask Gerald

• How much does the client need to know?
• Board States - Is it okay to simply send difference in states in order to reduce information sent from server to client? (Or is the whole 'board' required each time?)

Next Meeting

Date

• Tuesday 29th of July.

Things To Do Before Next Meeting

• All - Put contact details on wiki.
• Dan to do paper prototyping for above mentioned interfaces.
• Shruthi and Geoffrey to bring (about) 3 examples of turn-based games, ideally with large variations between them, so comparisons can be drawn, and important points about the games can be extracted.
• Joey to look into API stuff.
• Katherine to post these.
• Danver to (Uhm...? Looks like I forgot to note this one down).