I’m posting some information about my Community Friday project here at IT Mill.
I’m doing a Texas hold 'em -game with the toolkit. The idea is to support a tableful of players, each playing in their own browser. There would also, naturally, be some virtual playmoney which can be used to make bets etc.
Something that I’ve mused about, is to implement some kind of bot-pluggability; anyone could program a poker playing bot (and its AI, to be exact) against a certain API, and have AI:s play against each other. This is a long way off, though.
I have currently completed the logic of dealing hands to players and comparing hands against each other, to determine who has won. This includes taking into account the community cards in additional to the two personal cards.
What I’m currently trying to figure out, is basically a decent architecture for the game itself. I’ve never programmed a
real
game before, so implementing stuff like a pre-game lobby, the concept of a game instance, connecting several players together through a central server, etc, is new to me and takes time to figure out properly.
I also need to research into the field of a server push, to avoid constantly and actively polling the game status from the clients. There’s no server-push mechanism in Toolkit yet (although there’s a tweak to get polling working). The project activity is quite low at the moment, as I’ve got “real” work to do that has a higher priority.
Unfortunately I haven’t got any source code online yet, because I don’t regard my code fit for publishing just yet. OTOH, if people become interested, I might just put something in a repository.
So, that’s what I’m currently doing, what I’ve done thus far, and where my work has stalled. Any thoughts, ideas and critique is welcome.