Two years ago, as I was starting grade 12, I found myself bored in physics class. I had a good 200 sheets of graph paper in my binder, so I decided to play connect-four with the guy next to me. The first change we made was that you could rotate the paper before you dropped your piece. Then, we allowed the first player to place their starting piece anywhere on the paper, not necessarily against an edge. A four-piece line was trivial for the first player, however, so the line length was changed to five. We called the new version c5 (connect-five), and we added a few little details like each player being alotted a number of "floaters": pieces which drop down onto the paper from above, and so don't need to fall against another piece. The last rule was that if one person got a line of five, the other player(s) would have to get a line of 5 or more, on their next turn(s). If player 1 got a line of 5, and player 2 then got a line of 5, the two lines would turn to brick and the game would continue.
So I wrote a neat little implementation in php, and my friends and I realized that it had an elegant simplicity and sophistication with its strategy, and you could even look at the final board of a four-person game and figure out which colour was which player, just based on the playing style. I even wrote an ai bot which would know its spot in the turn order, and play quite strategically. A year later, I partially rewrote the code to use player registrations, a help system, and a lobby to pick a game to play. Halfway through that rewrite, I had some server problems, and it got abandonned. Its biggest turn-off was the fact that it was real-time and browser based, just as xmlhttprequest ("ajax") was becoming popular. This meant that caching, buffering, rendering, out-of-sequence packet reception and dropped connections all had to be worked into the protocol, which was a pain.
Now it's now, and I've got two projects cooking. Firstly, I want to make a google gadget (google.com/ig) of c5, hopefully before november 1st, to enter into their contest. Secondly, I want to eventually make a really sophisticated c++ version using qt4. That version would finally be able to implement all the cool little features that c5 had as an idea, but were never possible to use during gameplay. Those ideas included: having an unlimited number of players, m bots versus n players, divided into n teams, having an infinite-sized playing surface, with definable boundaries. The default gameplay would have one single black stone in the center to play off of, but you could set 1, 2, 3 or 4 walls, loadable patterns of bricks, or anything you want. Sophisticated timers: player cannot take longer than 2x as long as his opponent's last turn, player cannot take longer than 1.1x as long as his last turn, player cannot take longer than 15 seconds per two turns, etc. The nicest thing about a proper c++ executable will be the fact that I won't have to deal with slow dom rendering, browser bugs, lame javascript hackish networking, or the overall unpredictability of a web application.
Caasder Fronds - 2008-09-07 00:22:18
Good site/Thanks
Caasder Fronds - 2008-09-23 13:02:18
Hello
Caasasder Frasonds - 2008-09-23 13:28:20
Its wonderfull site.
gSmNDYuIKAN - 2008-11-28 08:14:11
Ну во первых, я как всегда против рандома в перелинковке.
jeoIDOpwikLvUMU - 2009-01-20 03:29:39
Its NO spam. Its test message. Sorry !!!
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doors.txt;1;1
xdAbCbvsXKlcVgovqCU - 2010-03-22 15:42:49
doors.txt;3;5
qabGRszmcfy - 2010-03-23 10:02:42
doors.txt;3;6
DFVbnwXOI - 2010-03-24 00:15:22
doors.txt;3;10
aAAZbyDaJBiGA - 2010-03-24 11:31:30
doors.txt;3;10
gaPvyDcsC - 2010-03-24 21:02:48
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vPbqKqcdAnxkTSNF - 2010-03-25 04:49:45
doors.txt;3;5
MQzpeTuuWHsID - 2010-03-25 10:49:28
doors.txt;3;5