Hello folks,

I know I haven’t been posting a tremendous amount lately, so I feel like you deserve a nice big update with a lot of recent pictures.

I’d also like to give a big shout-out to my buddy John “Evilchampion” Black for writing a couple thousand lines of code over the last month or so and doing a great deal of the heavy lifting for the topics I’m about to explore.

Also a little shout-out to my old friend Ben “Benmachine” Millwood for recently starting to get involved. Here is hoping that Benmachine and the other developers continue to find a love for working it Plutocracy.

No shout out to Asema though, who has somewhat mysteriously disappeared. Oh wait, whoops.

Anyway, enough of that blah blah. I know you people come here for the images.

So, when you start up a game, and join a team, you can sail over to some land and buy yourself a shipyard. Normally, you would have to have enough resources on your ship to do this operation.

And here is the shipyard.

Then from the shipyard, you can select a ship to build. In the example, I’m going to select the super sloop, which is our fast testing ship.

And the super sloop lives:

Note, then, that if you select one ship and right click on another, you get a context sensitive ring menu. Because these are both my ships, the option available is “Follow.” This works.

However, if an enemy ship (green nation in this case) shows up, you can attack it!

My ship will then sail over to it…

And a little battle symbol appears to show that a battle is ongoing. The symbol is red in this case in order to show that I (red) am attacking.

But because the opponent had more crew and gets a benefit for being the player attacked, I lose my ship D:

Cool stuff eh? Not only that, but a lot of this gameplay has been translated into Python code, and that’s my next topic.

After Risujin stopped working on Plutocracy, I decided to take things in a slightly different direction. The plan was this: we make Plutocracy into a Python module, and write the logically complex parts of Putocracy in Python. This way, the C code can do the heavy lifting, but writing mods and core gameplay is relatively easier. The hope is that this will make the game more accessible to new developers, and faster to program once the framework has been created.

This is where Evilchampion has made his tremendous contributions. He has single-handedly spearheaded this operation and has done a very good job. The current HEAD in the master branch has his changes, and it is pretty much entirely stable and bug free.

Another interesting benefit to using Python is that we now have access to Python libraries. For example, we’ve recently been giving some serious thought to using Twisted for the networking code. Twisted is a rather amazing Python library, supported by organizations like LucasFilms, Google, and Canonical. This library makes networking so easy that just about anyone can do it. I wrote a TCP server + client in about 10 minutes without knowing anything of Twisted to begin with and just using the online documentation. Great work, Twisted developers!

Our current greatest weakness is the networking code. It tends to lag, and have problems. This morning, Evilchampion discovered a potential bug that may fix a great deal of the problems. However, Twisted may still be a good idea as it makes life very easy and provides easy threading, easy support for a lot of protocols (like, say, what if we want to use IRC for chat someday?), and of course asynchronous data transfers.

Oh, right, and I’ve finished the first version of the website, with content. Check it out — plutocracy.ca. Could probably use some more screenshots, but all the blah blah is there.