I also came up with a cool idea for building maps in the game. It’s based on the simple ASCII maps from the game Austerlitz. Something like:

**............**
***.........***
**...........p**

Could be parsed up and converted to a series of locations where the asterix’s are land, the dots are sea and the p’s are ports. It might be an easy way to build fancy maps quickly. Something like .[50]. could be parsed as “50 sea locations”.

I set both of them up via Google Code. The first is a straight-up clone of Tradewars 2021 from the old BBS days, set in O’Brien’s world of fighting ships. I’m not sure I’ve said this before, but I love those O’Brien books. A ton. I’m on book 18, only three more to read. Kind of sad. Regardless, I used to love Tradewars, got briefly into Blacknova Traders (a PHP clone of the Tradewars game) and decided it would be a fun diversion for a bit.

The second project is writing an RSVP system / user group management “thingee” for ChiPy. We use a wiki currently, which is a great way to decentralize things, which I’m all for. For RSVP stuff, it would be nice to have a management interface. I put out a request on the ChiPy list to see if other folks would be interested. As I was writing this, a response came in to my request. I totally forgot there was an earlier effort along these lines. We’ll probably just finish that one up.

Anyway, I have some stuff to work on for TechCoffee that should be fun.