Interactive tabletop playing surface (Space Hulk Hobby Challenge)

The scale of this project has ballooned quite dramatically in recent weeks, but, having been featured in the weekend roundup was quite inspiring, so I got a bit of my mojo back and pushed on.

I might even have to take a few days off work as the deadline looms — soooo much still to do (and still I can waste hours just burning toon versions of space aliens with a flame thrower, all for absolutely no purpose whatsoever!)

Of course there’s a lot of work building the electronics but, as an electronics engineer, that’s the least part of the build for me! The game/app development is proving to be a big drain on time, but there’s also a lot of time being spent building tools that nobody will ever see…

An online character editor, for example.

Because if you’re going to play this game over the internet, then both players need to be able to access a common set of data; it can’t be stored locally (where nefarious types might hack into the relatively simple data structures, to give their own team an unfair advantage!)

Yep, it’s fugly, but it works. A simple online editor lets me set parameters about each of the teams playing – from weapon types to headgear to what type of armour they’re wearing. In time, it’d be nice to get a proper UI built around this, and a log-in system so different players could manage their own teams online.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that this will all be live by the end of the challenge date. So for now players just have to play with teams that I build. I just hope all that power doesn’t go to my head…..

The reason for the extra effort to build an online editor? Well, basically, because my game app uses a really crude data structure – and it mostly looks like gibberish. Anyone who’s ever worked with computers and data transfer probably recognise it as something from the late 80s – hastily delimited strings and nasty pipe characters everywhere.

Hey, don’t judge my code. It works, ok? 😉