Saturday, January 10, 2004
Casdra Software Update - The Games
Here is the long promised update on the software of Casdra Software, starting with the games. I make games for both the Palm and Pocket PC platforms. Cribbage Partner remains my most popular application by far. Starting about this time last year I put a great deal of effort into the project of making a stronger cribbage opponent. About three months of work with genetic algorithms lead to the release of version 2.5. Aside from a bug fix for problems with Palm OS 5 I haven't had a release since then. In the mean time I have ported the code so that it compiles on my Mac OS X laptop and can more easily work with it. I have a few requested features that I plan to work on and I hope to do a release in the next couple of months. I have new mailing list software for my server and I'll be contacting registered users through that.
On to Baseball Partner. I'm really happy with the way this game turned out. The games most of the time feel real. There are ebbs and flows and big comebacks. The result tables are the heart of the game. During development I experimented with them by writing a program to play thousands of games and I tweaked the tables, especially the Pitch table, to get the average scores of games to match with real averages of major league games. I was surprised at how much of a skew I had to favor the defense on the Pitch table to get it to come out correctly. The second release added the dice changing tokens and greatly increased the strategy.
The next step for the game is to make the computer player stronger. There are two places for this to happen. The most obvious is adding tokens for the computer to use. This is a tricky problem that I have not thought about much. When to use them and how many to use are interesting questions. I mostly use mine on offence but I'm not sure what the best strategy is. The other area of improvement is in play calling. When I first made the game I programmed three rough "personalities" for the computer player relating to how often they would attempt to steal, bunt or hit and run. Currently the game randomly picks a personality before each game. I think these could be improved and perhaps some new strategies would be better. Both of these areas lend themselves to the genetic algorithm technique I used to evolve the much improved cribbage opponent. I hope to do this work and get a new release of Baseball Partner out sometime during this coming baseball season.
The final game is HiRollers and there is not much to say. It's a very simple time killer. The only thing that bugs me is the fact that it does not report the average number of numbers taken with a decimal. I'd like to add that if I can get some time.
An area of improvement for all the games is support for hi-res screens. I have a Zire 71 now and the graphics for my games could use some polish for these screens.
As I said, now that I'm not forced to use Windows to do the programming for these games I plan to work on them a lot more than I have been.
On to Baseball Partner. I'm really happy with the way this game turned out. The games most of the time feel real. There are ebbs and flows and big comebacks. The result tables are the heart of the game. During development I experimented with them by writing a program to play thousands of games and I tweaked the tables, especially the Pitch table, to get the average scores of games to match with real averages of major league games. I was surprised at how much of a skew I had to favor the defense on the Pitch table to get it to come out correctly. The second release added the dice changing tokens and greatly increased the strategy.
The next step for the game is to make the computer player stronger. There are two places for this to happen. The most obvious is adding tokens for the computer to use. This is a tricky problem that I have not thought about much. When to use them and how many to use are interesting questions. I mostly use mine on offence but I'm not sure what the best strategy is. The other area of improvement is in play calling. When I first made the game I programmed three rough "personalities" for the computer player relating to how often they would attempt to steal, bunt or hit and run. Currently the game randomly picks a personality before each game. I think these could be improved and perhaps some new strategies would be better. Both of these areas lend themselves to the genetic algorithm technique I used to evolve the much improved cribbage opponent. I hope to do this work and get a new release of Baseball Partner out sometime during this coming baseball season.
The final game is HiRollers and there is not much to say. It's a very simple time killer. The only thing that bugs me is the fact that it does not report the average number of numbers taken with a decimal. I'd like to add that if I can get some time.
An area of improvement for all the games is support for hi-res screens. I have a Zire 71 now and the graphics for my games could use some polish for these screens.
As I said, now that I'm not forced to use Windows to do the programming for these games I plan to work on them a lot more than I have been.
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