Announcing Universe Conflict!

Posted to the new project space on SourceForge.net:

An implementation of Space War!, one of the first digital computer games, created in 1961 on the PDP-1 computer, as recreated using the <canvas> HTML5 element and Ajax. It uses the Frozen Toolkit for the client-server communication and currently renders all images and animation using canvas and JavaScript objects.

I had always intended to release this as an open source project, but then realized that I didn't really have the full time to dedicate to it. It also currently exists more as sample code and an interactive demo than anything else, and I figured I should just post it for all to see and hopefully for some to contribute. I initially posted the introduction to it on my blog.

The client-side of this game currently works in Firefox and Opera, though gravity and shooting do not yet exist. The server-side of this currently works insofar as the absolute minimum required to send messages from one browser to the other in order for the two players to fly around each other.

At any rate, check out the code (svn co https://@webspacewar.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/webspacewar), play around with it, and feel free to submit patches! :-) I would love to see this completed and fully playable. "Space War!" doesn't have a lot of (base) rules, so it shouldn't take much to get there.

Edit: I've also finally, finally checked in the source code for a link checker I started...oh, I think back in 2002... I created the Cocoa/WebKit branch in order to do two things:

1. Learn Objective-C and Cocoa
2. Use the Cocoa/WebKit API in order to take care of the HTTP handling