There's a nice little post about HackWars here:

http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2010/01/evidyon-hackwars-and-slothrpg-free...

In other news, I'm not dead, just insanely busy at my start-up job in Toronto (eh!)

I will continue to work on weekends -- in other news we're always looking for new Devs, email bencoe@gmail.com

Ben, a.k.a., Johnny_Heart

Thanks everybody for the friends list feedback, it was incredibly helpful. Based on that, we worked out this spec sheet it's a little long so I tried to keep things really brief. Let me know if more detail would be appropriate...

Note : Main chat will have the /af /rf commands functional to it so that we can test this thing. Can't really use a friends list without friends.

###DATABASE

We'll make a NEW user_relation table, to avoid problems with altering the old one (can remove it once we've fixed the main chat).

userA
relation set("friend", "ignore")
userB

###RETRIEVING FRIENDS LIST FROM SERVER

We can create a new type of Msg, userFriendMsgIn/Out, which can serve a request for the friends of a particular user (Into Server), and then a list of friends directed at the appropriate user

###ATTRIBUTES

String[] friends - array list of friends
String[] online_friends - array list of friends who are currently online

###GUI COMPONENTS (swing)

JFrame
JPanel - Background
JLabel - "Friends"
JScrollpane
JList w CellRenderer (friends list with a renderer (html?) to provide color/font styling, JList provides selection capability)

###EVENTS

Friends list load event

retrieve friends from user_relation table
retrieve online status from user table

Mouse event (clicking on a username in the JList)

command(left-click):
(if user online)
whisper
(if user offline)
view profile

options (right-click):
whisper (deactivated when user offline)
view profile
remove from friends

User Event

remove friend command
send remove command to server
refresh friends list from db
repaint list of friends

received userOnlineMsg/userOfflineMsg
update online_friends
repaint list of friends

###LOOK AND FEEL

Colour Scheme (matches website)

TEXT COLOR : #CCCCCC (light grey)
HEADINGS AND BORDERS : #0099FF (blue)
WINDOW BACKGROUND : #000000 (black)
PANEL BACKGROUND : #333333 (dark grey)

As usual, comments are appreciated. Another round of feedback would be appropriate, and then we can get to coding this biatch.

keep hackin'
the HW dev team

Early in the morning Sunday, I will be moving the HackWars server over to a new virtual host. Hopefully this goes smoothly -- if it does it saves us lots of money, and puts us in a better position to scale.

- Johnny_Heart

What is up everybody. Let's keep the chat revamp moving along by hammering out the details for the new Friends list, which will be detached from the main chat. Feedback is appreciated as always. Look: Something like this picture. The highlighted names indicate that the users are online.


Clicking on an online user:/w, /r - whisper, reply, view profile, remove from Friends, ?

Clicking on an offline user: view profile, remove from Friends?

Colors: see Pic - basically like drac's website theme

Sizing: What % of available screen space would be appropriate? Obviously this should be column shaped. Maybe sized to fit the friends that need to be displayed up to a min/max height and width...

Messages Needed (messages are the Java classes that pass between client and server):
We'll need to make a new class userMessage (click here for a listing of all the message classes):

userMessage: userOnline userOffline userStatus

Databases of relevance:

userrelation - I'm not really sure what this bad boy is involved in, but it's there. It's basically what I'd be proposing except the "comment" field, and I have no idea what is intended there (I guess we'll find out).

Field Type
USERA int(11)
USERB int(11)
COMMENT varchar(14)
RELATION set('FRIEND', 'IGNORE')

So that is the preliminary plan. Once we hammer out all the functionality needed, we can probably get coding this.

keep hackin'
the HW dev team

What is up HackWarriors. Here are some early design pics a new chat interface. Feedback is welcome. Keep in mind that it is still quite rough (I made it with the GUI builder in NetBeans :p), so this is just to communicate the general idea. We will be preserving/enhancing the existing chat functions that already work (so we won't focus on them here). This document focuses entirely on the most significant changes we will be making to the system.

The chat will be given its own window (and separated from Game Messages, more on that later) but will keep using the tab/channel system. However, there will also be working friends list and an optional channel listing (if available).



If you go up to the 'Tabs' menu, you'll get the ability to create your own custom Tab. You can apply filters so that the tab you create has messages from multiple channels in it (or just one, as before). You'll also be able to set which Tabs load by default.



Anyway, that is the long and short of it. Comments and feedback are appreciated as usual. Follow me on twitter if you want to have your say on the more specific issues.

keep hackin'

the HW dev team