Card game

Is there any inherent structure to the cards?

Take typical playing cards suitable for Poker. All cards fall into one of four suits. Alternatively, there are 13 cards of each suit. Thus, for some games (such as Concentration), a two-dimensional array can be the optimal way to store the cards. I have seen people resort to a 4-D array as a way of simplifying search and comparison algorithms.

At a bare minumum, use an array with each distinct card having a point value, and those cards sorted appropriately. You will find that, depending on the rules of the game and particular properties of the cards, you may find it more efficient to break it up into multiple arrays, sets, trees, stacks, queues, whatever.

Unless you tell us what the rules of the game are, we can only suggest that you play around with it.

TheDavid at 2007-7-1 23:30:38 >

ahh, for that sort of detail I'd recommend having a Card class that holds all the desired info. Color, type, name, image, description, value, and whatever other attributes the cards have so that you can use it in all ways desired. For standard game cards the array or 4d array stuff is fine, but for cards in a game like that, you'll want a class for it as you'll have lots of information to hold for each card.

Malohkan at 2007-7-1 23:30:38 >

The easiest, but not necessarily the best way, mathematically speaking, is to simply fetch 60 cards at random from the database, and either push the cards onto a stack or enqueue the cards. In this case, the stack or queue preserves the order that the cards are drawn, and the random selection of primary keys in the database does the same thing as shuffling the cards.

I suggest that if you go this route, you have a tweakable frequency table wherein you can suggest if certain cards are unique, very rare, rare, uncommon, whatever. Every time you randomly fetch a card, check to see if you've exceeded the limits allowed.

So the answer to your question would be to use a stack or a queue. When the player draws a card, he simply pops or dequeues the next available card.

However, you'll see this is not very mathematically sound - the odds of fetching that unique ancient multi-hued dragon are one in N where N is the total number of distinct cards, not the total number of cards period (which could theoretically be infinite).

To get realistic odds, you will have specify somewhere, just how many black swamp land cards are available in the universe. If you're interested in this approach, I'll see if I can whip up a decent algorithm for rebalancing the odds. You'd still probably want to either use an 60 element array (with a bottom of deck marker), a stack or a queue to store the draw pile.

TheDavid at 2007-7-1 23:30:38 >

So lets pretend I decided to hold the important information about each card in a database, a Microsoft Works Database to be specific. Is there an easy way to access the information without going through the trouble of trying to learn SQL? Is there any kind of tutorial I should be looking at, or am I on my own on this one? once again, any and all help would be much appreciated. thanks

IIIIIIll at 2007-7-1 23:30:39 >

I want to send the users all the cards I have available at once, with the game. Then, as more cards become available, send them "booster packs", containing all of then new cards. The players will not ever actually have to "make" a card, but will be able to choose from a searchable list of cards to create a deck.

IIIIIIll at 2007-7-1 23:30:39 >

yes, I understand that I can't have the spells translated from english. The only problem is there are an unlimited number of possible spells, so I have to decide on how to break down the spells into general types. To combat this problem, I was going to break them into types, creating subclasses of my Card class for each type, which will have methods like, dealDamage(int damage, Player player(or Creature)) and gainLife(int Life, Player player); the actual type of spell will be contained in the same place that the name of the card and its color are stored, in this case, a text file.

IIIIIIll at 2007-7-1 23:30:41 >

Starting to feel overwhelmed? :)

Relax.

One of the more useful tools we developers have is a concept known as Model - Controller - View or MVC. Essentially what that is, is a design template that splits a program up into three components, a data source, the core logic, and the presentation layer. The primary advantage of MVC is that you can completely replace one of the three components without having to recode the other two.

In this example, Microsoft Works would be the initial data source component, and a custom built scripting language would be the eventual data source. You would however, not have to change the GUI, or the various rules for playing the game (and otherwise "using" the program). Alternatively, if you decide to switch from a Swing GUI to an Applet, you should - in theory - only have to change the presentation layer code.

This may be a case where MVC is more appropriate than trying to decide specifically on what database to use for the main storage and what abstract data type to use for the draw pile, right from the start. The disadvantage is that you have to be pretty familiar with programming concepts, enough that you can "appropriately" break up various parts of your program into one of the three components.

I suggest that you try Googling for an introductory tutorial to the MVC design pattern, and see if it makes sense to you. If so, then use that and postpone the various data questions until you're ready for them.

TheDavid at 2007-7-1 23:30:41 >

If you're going for the Yahoo style server, you'll probably have to hard code the server's IP (or a location it can retrieve it from). For the actual tables, you could have the creating player host it and simply pass that player's IP to the other player who joins the table; all the server would have to do is keep a list of created tables and IP addresses, and maybe some describing text if you want to get fancy ^_^.

For simple networking (or at least my style of networking, which may or may not be correct), I suggest looking into the Socket, ServerSocket, ObjectInputStream, and ObjectOutputStream classes.

-Rejun

Rejun2000 at 2007-7-1 23:30:41 >