Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Whizzard

As I've mentioned a few times, I spend a reasonable amount of my free time (and sometimes bits of my not free time ("compiling!")) working on Sutekh, our card manager for VtES.

As I've also mentioned, I created a fork of Sutekh called Thufir, which does the same thing for the defunct Dune CCG. While I got Thufir to a point I was happy with, I never really kep it up to date with Sutekh's developments, so the two code bases diverged rather rapidly.

Now we add the recent Android: Netrunner LCG into the mix. While there are a varierty of web-based card managers for A:NR, I find them clunky, and there's a dearth of other options. Maintaining a third fork of Sutekh also looked really unappealing, so I hatched a cunning plan to refactor Sutekh considerably, pulling a lot of non-VtES specific code into a nice, reasonably reusable basis for writing card management applications. I also reworked Thufir to use this new framework, fixing a lot of bugs and gaining a whole lot of new, useful features there. Of course, this all took time, and, as a result, I didn't get around to actually working on my A:NR app (called Whizzard).

Over the weekend, I decided to knuckle down and actually start working on this. Although there is still missing data and a bunch of features to hook up, it's moved past the vapourware stage really quickly, which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling about the refactoring work done on Sutekh.



Sutekh's base infrastructure is still not quite as self-contained as I'd like, which would avoid needing to duplicate code in the various repos, but I still haven't come up which a way of plugging the last couple of leaks I'm happy with, so I'll live with the current state of affairs until inspiration strikes.