The Role of the Player in Strategic Primer

In my posts about the distinctives of Strategic Primer, I’ve described several features that it, unlike other games, offers players. And a couple of years ago I described the purpose of “AI” players in the game. But I thought it would be a good idea to consider what the role of a human player is in Strategic Primer.

2000-2001 Campaign Log: Part 8

Today we continue the annotated log of the firt campaign of Strategic Primer, which I continued last month with the beginning of the third turn, dated February 17, 2001. We continue the log of that turn today.

Strategic Primer assistive programs development report and roadmap

In the month or so since the last development report, I’ve made significant progress in the development of the suite of assistive programs for players and Judges of Strategic Primer. If you’re still using an older version, I encourage you to update to the current version (source on Launchpad for now; binaries—for Windows, for Mac, and cross-platform JAR—on Google Docs for now). And for once I can cross several items off last month’s roadmap.

Strategic Primer: Yet Another Resolution Change (RFC)

Over the past few months of development of the map viewer for Strategic Primer, after going to a great deal of effort to convert to a much higher resolution, populate the map with several “fixtures” on every (smaller) tile, make sure that players’ maps matched the main map, and then keep everything up to date with improvements to the viewer and the map format, I’ve come to the conclusion that the current size and scale make the map far too big to deal with, in practical terms.

2000-2001 Campaign Log: Part 7

Today we continue the annotated log of the first campaign of Strategic Primer, which I continued last month.

Strategic Primer assistive programs development report and roadmap

It’s been almost a month since the last development report, so it’s time for another update.

Plans for Strategic Primer in Ceylon

For a while now I’ve been excited about a new programming language, Ceylon. It’s designed to run on the Java Virtual Machine and be interoperable with Java, but to fix many of the faults of Java that I find most troubling, and introduce some new features I’ve often wished for. As soon as it becomes usable—which I hope will be with the release of the second milestone version of the Eclipse plugin—I plan to begin porting the Strategic Primer assistive programs to it. Here’s a few highlights of the features that make this so exciting for me:

Flags in Strategic Primer

Over on the Holy Worlds forum somewhat recently, Aubrey Hansen posted a link to an app that lets you design flags. Which got me to thinking about flags, and their uses.

In Strategic Primer, the players don’t know everything about each other. They might not even know for sure how many players there are, and they certainly don’t know each other’s “code names.” But it’d be nice to know, when encountering two of another player’s units on separate occasions, whether they belong to the same player or not. And it’d be nice to give players another outlet for their creativity.

So I am suggesting that players in the current campaign, and any future campaigns, create flags to represent their forces. (Using that app, or any other tools they prefer.) I’ll create flags for the “AI players”, and I’ll add support for displaying them to the map viewer.

Any thoughts?

Related articles

• Strategic Primer assistive programs development report and roadmap (shinecycle.wordpress.com)

2000-2001 Campaign Log: Part 6

Today I’m continuing the annotated log of the first campaign of Strategic Primer, which I last updated in January.

Strategic Primer assistive programs development report and roadmap

In the past month or so since my last development report, there’s been some noteworthy changes to my suite of assistive programs for players and Judges of Strategic Primer.