International relations
My first real game of Diplomacy went ... okay. I picked Italy out of the hat, but traded nations to Russia with someone not so interested in being a superpower. In the car, j3h mentioned that perhaps being an early threat would be a bad move. I agreed, and then proceeded to make myself an early threat. Some early victories led to the Gigantic Russian Front Sweeping Towards Western Europe. Once Austria-Hungary was off the board, I raised the ire of Germany.
I took a few knocks, and then we called it a night due to being too tired to care. The board's in a pretty interesting position, though. Hopefully we can finish it out remotely.
There was talk of a rewrite of the board thingy to use the Google maps API. Adding the zoom and grab-to-scroll stuff would be nice; something which knew about the graph of regions and figured out legal moves would be really nice; something to automatically resolve the orders would be killer.
There's a bit of a problem with step one, though. The nicest thing would be to just use the real map of europe, then draw the regions on top of it. That's all possible, but there a zoom issue: as you can see here, zoom level 3 is too big, but going "in" one to zoom level 4 means you're panning around to see both the south and the north. (The div is locked to 8x6; if I do go down this path I'll get the fancy resizing div like in Google Local, but the problem will still be there for laptops.)
The other solution is to use the map graphic from jes5199's version as an overlay (like what the WoW maps kids do), which would work great but isn't quite as neat as putting the lines on a satellite map.
Ideas?
I took a few knocks, and then we called it a night due to being too tired to care. The board's in a pretty interesting position, though. Hopefully we can finish it out remotely.
There was talk of a rewrite of the board thingy to use the Google maps API. Adding the zoom and grab-to-scroll stuff would be nice; something which knew about the graph of regions and figured out legal moves would be really nice; something to automatically resolve the orders would be killer.
There's a bit of a problem with step one, though. The nicest thing would be to just use the real map of europe, then draw the regions on top of it. That's all possible, but there a zoom issue: as you can see here, zoom level 3 is too big, but going "in" one to zoom level 4 means you're panning around to see both the south and the north. (The div is locked to 8x6; if I do go down this path I'll get the fancy resizing div like in Google Local, but the problem will still be there for laptops.)
The other solution is to use the map graphic from jes5199's version as an overlay (like what the WoW maps kids do), which would work great but isn't quite as neat as putting the lines on a satellite map.
Ideas?