Java Board Games

General Discussions
#1

Has anybody seen good resources / ideas / frameworks for strategical board games.
I do not mean mobile arcade games, therefore please don’t point me to general 3D or mobile frameworks, I meant special board game mappings, like ‘Risk’, ‘Diplomacy’.

A friend and me started to program a user-interface for an old PBM (play-by-mail) game, called “Ashes of the Empire”.
Creating a 2D starmap from a textfile containing coordinates, showing ships at the planets using drag and drop to order the movement of the ships from one planet to the other.
In our prototype we used flat Button Objects, with hand drawn planet bitmaps for our planets, as they already provide drag-and-drop and are easily to scale on arbitrary screen size.

Any nice links or ideas?

#2

I wrote a risk game once kinda. I made the map myself by downloading a normal atlas map of goole images, and then wrting an app to allowing me to select points to make areas on the map.
I was quite low tech in those days. I used alpha blended colous for the areas that went over the map. So the political areas changed colour but you could still see the map underneath.
The best thing about it was the map I downloaded was bloody awsome. And as a reult my game looked awsome, so much so I nerly finished the thing (but I didn’t).
I learnt some kind of a valuable lesson that day. Graphics which until that day had never interested me becuase they were arbitary, I like functionality. But know I have learned that if something looks wicked you will want it to work properly all the more. Or something. Err, thats a bit off topic.
So yeah, steal a real map coz risk looks a million times better on top of it rather than some weird coloured pollock affair.

#3

Sounds like your on the right track. You might take a look at this thread for an example of an online turn based game.