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Player Access is a web application that provides the means for players of LARPs (Live Action Role Playing) to purchase skills and powers online. For those unfamiliar with these games, a LARP is a collection of game-masters and players, usually meeting several times during the year during which they interact in a real-time adventure. At the end of each of these "events" players are assigned a number of points to spend on their character's improvement. The typical method of "updating" a character has been through telephone conversations where players tell a game-master their choices.
Player Access completely automates this task. This web application allows players to alter their characters at any chosen time, and to revise these choice within the confines of the updating window. It is an example of a modern-day three tiered application (Client, Server, Database). Since this is a Java solution, the Server consists of a variety of JSPs and a central Servlet. The choice was made for a fat applet client to minimize client-server interactions, as well as to provide smoothly animated, fast processing of player updating choices. Any database can be used as long as it is relational and accessible through JDBC. The program was designed to be fully configurable to support various gaming systems. Resultingly, the business logic describing how skills and powers are purchased is contained in the Database and not in the Server or Client. Theoretically, no modification of the Server or Client is necessary to support a new gaming system.
Player Access is currently in deployment status for Fantasy Quest, a Connecticut based LARP. You can interact with a mock version of their site here to try it out. Choose "FQ Community", and then "Player Services".
A graph editor with a built in scripting language for calculating graph properties. The scripting language is java-esque with variables, lists, function calls, etc. The environment can be configured to cause execution of a script once a graph has been altered in some manner. In this way, changes in graph properties of interest can be viewed in real time as changes are made in the graph. This application is also of use for entering graphs visually and saving their adjacency matrices to a text file for later use in other applications.
Try it out, the applet version has all of
the functionality of the full application minus saving/opening of graphs
and scripts. Feel free to use the full
application. It is stored as a jar file. For those of you new to the
java experience, the jar can be run from the command line via the
statement
GraphCalc has a Swing based GUI. It was originally written using AWT and was solely a graph editor. If your are interested in seeing how GraphCalc developed, take a look at its first incarnation .
Designing a good card game is one thing. Designing a card game that involves betting and a house (in particular, you as the house) requires knowing exactly what the probabilities are for various card combinations to be dealt. This program uses the same scripting language as GraphCalc to allow a user to design a deck of cards, hands (e.g. a pair), and events (e.g. getting a pair in the first hand of draw power). The user can then use CGS to determine the probabilites of these event through exact calculation or, when that is not feasible, through simulation.
The applet loads with the example of a standard game of stud poker. Feel free to download the full application (loading/saving enabled) in the form of a jar file. The application is run from the command line via the statement