Yesterday evening I imported the last of the content from the developer’s guide from the old justCheckers site. I didn’t import any of the even older web content, since most of that was redundant and old. On one hand, I would like to show for my progress back in university. On the other hand, I don’t since I made some rather glaring mistakes back then. Back in university, I attempted to run justCheckers as a professional open source project. Of course, being new to both professional programming and project management I made some fairly easy to avoid mistakes.

For the time being, I can say that all the relevant content is in now on the site, and is properly organized. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back to developing justCheckers again. But first I want to make the site look less of a default Drupal install. Don’t get me wrong, I like Drupal default themes. However the justCheckers project has a unique style to it, and that should reflect in the look and feel of the site. I plan on using a theme based of the static theme work I did earlier.

I’m putting my involvement with the justCheckers project on hold for a while. Progress ground to a halt when I started to dig into the code. In its current state most of the application’s core functionality needs reworking. Meaning to go forward someone would need to reimplement slides and jumps that allows for multiple jumps and so-called “flying kings”. And the GUI needs refactoring to run in a multithreaded manner and with a main game event loop. I already devised the algorithms for the core game engine. But I need to translate that into real code. I plan on implement those eventually. But the amount of effort to reward doesn’t add up at the moment for me. So justCheckers will not be on my high priority list for the next little while.

Just to be clear, I am not abandoning the project. I still want to work on it. But there are higher priorities on my list. If anyone wants to step up to the plate and massage the code, I’ll gladly help. And when once I get my other higher priority tasks done, I will return to hacking on justCheckers.

I hope so far, everyone is having a happy new 2009. On the development front of justCheckers, I designed a generic move algorithm. This algorithm handles the movement of pieces: both slides and jumps. It also accounts for multiple jumps and for the various checker rule variants out there. However before I implement this code, I want to map out the codebase itself.

I plan to do this by mapping out the components, classes and processes with UML. This way I can better understand how I plan to implement the application and what is it actually doing at the moment. This will help with simplifying the user interface and the rest of the codebase going forward.

I hoped to release version 0.1.1 of justCheckers end of last month. However, I soon realized why I temporarily stopped the project earlier on. Before I went on my hiatus from the project, I started to refactor the game engine to allow for more flexible rules: “flying” kings and other interesting variations on checkers. Unfortunately this proved more difficult then I previously expected. So I stopped.

Before I can release the next version I need to fix/implement the game engine. I might take a few short-cut liberties to speed up the process. Might being the keyword. So while I already re-licensed and updated the documentation, a non-working game engine holds back the next release.