TripleA is an open source axis and allies clone, the homepage with some screenshots is here,
http://triplea.sourceforge.net/
If anyone can get this to run on a mac would you please post here. I had a bug saying that it wouldnt run, but I dont have access to a mac and can’t test it.
Note, it requires jdk 1.4
Starts easys and looks already quite mature. No problems on 1600x1200, NT4 (!).
Works well with 1.5beta also.
Hi,
runs fine on my W2K machine. The scolling is very smooth, especially if you move the rectangle in the overview map. Very good!!!
The whole game looks very professional to me.
Keep going…
Hi sbridges. I’m a mac user, and it runs perfectly on OS X 10.2.4. It would be cool to not have to use the terminal, but I’m sure that’s a plan of yours for someday.
Nice work! Fun to play. I think the graphics are, for the most part, excellent. My only quibble is that the shading on the units is so un-saturated that sometimes it’s hard to tell which units belong to which side. Britain and Germany especially have units that are hard to tell apart. Since usually units are inside a country of their own color, this doesn’t matter much, but when units are at sea, it can get pretty confusing. I would recommend not using quite-so-light coloring on the units. But the look of the board is really cool, the unit designs look cool, it’s cool.
I should mention that I’ve never played the real A’n’A, so I can’t report any gameplay inaccuracies.
Some other comments:
There are times when I don’t think the unit-selection window should pop up, for instance, when there’s only one unit to unload onto a land space, or certain times during the battle sequence. I can’t remember exactly when during battle there were unnecessary windows, but I do remember a couple different times thinking, “the game should detect this situation and skip this window.”
The graphics for the unit selection arrows look very clunky on my Mac. I’m not sure if that’s because they don’t go well with OS X’s window graphics or what, but the first time I saw them I thought they were a bug. There appears to be a little half circle at the top and bottom of the arrows that really muddies things up. If possible, you should make the arrows bigger, I think.
My first instinct was to drag units from one space to another, not to click one space and then click another space. It would probably not be too hard to let the player have both options, clicking AND dragging.
Have you seen Solace (demo available at freeverse.com)? It uses an A’n’A-based combat system, and its combat screen is really cool. Check it out. You should totally rip it off. You probably won’t want to go as far as having 3-D dice rolls, but the main layout and battle flow would be pretty easy to copy.
I found the mouse-at-the-border-of-the-screen scrolling system unwieldly. My hand kept going to the arrow keys. I recommend making the arrow keys move the viewable box around on the map.
I don’t know how much of a hassle it would be, but I’d also like to see a more-zoomed-out view available. Civ III has a close-up view and a zoomed-out view, and I end up using each for different things.
Often, I would finish a phase and click done and then remember something else I’d wanted to do. It would be cool to have a “go back to last phase” button (“undo,” maybe?) that would let you, duh, go back to the last phase. Naturally, the player shouldn’t be able to undo combat, but I often forgot about attacks I’d wanted to make when I was in the movement phase. Undoing all that movement and going back to combat wouldn’t really be cheating, and it would be kind to absent-minded players like myself.
Sometimes when I tried to move a transport into a shore space and unload it in one move, I’d get an error message. I forget what it said, but I was then able to do the move in two parts: first move the transport to the shore space, then move the units off. That seems like a bug.
Well, that’s all my comments. All in all, I think it looks great and I encourage you to keep working on it. It’s coming out excellent. Thanks for posting it.
Thanks for the feedback and support everyone.
Im glad it runs in mac osx, jessewclark if you get a chance could you post a screen shot of the unit selection arrows? I would have used a JSPinner, but I started working on the game before they came out, and I realyl like having a max button.
I tried the demo for Solace and it is slick. I’ll see if I can use it for inspiration.
I’ll look into your other suggestions as well. Its just hard to find the time to work on the game at night after working all day.
I don’t know how to post images here, I suspect it involves using a web page address and I can’t do that, so I’ve sent an image to your email.
I think max and min buttons are a good idea, I just don’t think they look quite right, at least on the Mac.