For those interested in creating a client (and because the code isn’t yet ready for viewing!) here’s the current output of a test run on the server. Note that games, pieces and spells have a unique game ID, which is a letter followed by an incrementing numeric value. One of the current things I’m working on is cleaning up the code so all possible references are made to these UIDs, and not directly to the objects, as this will make things safer and more manageable within the engine at the expense of a little bit of performance (no doubt I’ll rewrite much of this at a later date so there are two ‘levels’ of code; the UID data-driven level that the users interact with, and the deeper object-driven stuff that processes things.

{
  "turn" : 1,
  "phase" : "select_spell",
  "interaction" : "all",
  "finished" : true,
  "actions" : [
    {
      "type" : "select_spell",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "spell" : "s0"
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "select_spell",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "spell" : "s6"
      }
    }
  ]
}

{
  "turn" : 1,
  "phase" : "cast",
  "interaction" : "sequence",
  "finished" : true,
  "actions" : [
    {
      "type" : "cast",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "spell" : "s0",
        "target" : {
          "x" : 0,
          "y" : 1
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "spawn",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "x" : 0,
        "y" : 1,
        "occupant" : {
          "uid" : "p2",
          "owner" : "lewster32",
          "properties" : {
            "movement" : 1,
            "combat" : 7,
            "defense" : 8,
            "maneuver" : 6,
            "resistance" : 4
          }
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "succeeded",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "spell" : "s0",
        "target" : {
          "x" : 0,
          "y" : 1
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "end_turn",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1262563476
    },
    {
      "type" : "cast",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "spell" : "s6",
        "target" : {
          "x" : 11,
          "y" : 1
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "spawn",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "x" : 11,
        "y" : 1,
        "occupant" : {
          "uid" : "p3",
          "owner" : "bobster16",
          "properties" : {
            "movement" : 1,
            "combat" : 6,
            "defense" : 5,
            "maneuver" : 2,
            "resistance" : 4
          }
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "succeeded",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1262563476,
      "data" : {
        "spell" : "s6",
        "target" : {
          "x" : 11,
          "y" : 1
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "end_turn",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1262563476
    }
  ]
}

These are what every player will receive at the end of each phase. They contain each action performed by the players in the order that they performed them, and timestamped for reference and backup purposes. Players have relatively limited access to the game in terms of actions, just like in the original game. A player may select spells, cast spells, move and attack pieces and end their turn. From these actions however, more actions may occur, so a player casting a spell on tile x will set off a chain of actions, where the server rolls against the spell’s chance, then (if successful) performs the spell’s effect, which may be to spawn a new piece or whatever.

Soon I’ll be locking down the format of these outputs, and documenting the errors and notices a user receives directly. This will allow for anyone wishing to do so to begin planning or working on a client – and I sincerely hope people do!

Lew: (Screaming) “MUHAHAHAHA!! IT’S ALIVE”

Ahem. Yes, I’ve been beavering away over the last few days and I can finally reveal a proper screenshot of some proper code doing something. Unfortunately, I’ve not started on a client yet, and I’m using a quickly thrown together browser-based console to work with it. However, it is a screenshot, and so I’ll upload it!

One of the fantastic bonuses of writing in Javascript is I have an interpreter with a great debugging suite at my disposal right from the outset with no messing on – Archaos’s core code is designed to run locally in a browser as well as server-side, and an adaptive messaging system will smooth the whole experience out so that what goes in and what comes out is the same wherever the clients or the servers are located.

The main change is how you set your selectors; instead of writing your own jQuery to target the elements you want to change, you feed rotColShiftOpts.cssTransforms with an array of objects. This is what Rotates.org uses:

[
	{
		selector: "a, h2, h3, h4, h5",
		styles: [
			"color"
		]
	},
	{
		selector: "#header, #searchsubmit",
		styles: [
			"background-color"
		]
	}
]

Actually it was a bit of a struggle, as I wanted to abandon the DOM-based approach to changing the CSS of every individual element, and go for a global stylesheet change. Easy you say? Just .append/.text a style element. Well, yes, in all decent browsers. Sadly, the IE family seems unwilling to let you tamper with the style element so easily, and jQuery (at the moment) has no elegant way around it. So out came the ‘Lew hacking pants’ with the following solution:

ieStyle = document.createStyleSheet();

$.each(rotColShiftOpts.cssTransforms, function(i, ttrans) {
	newColor = getColorWithOffsets(hue, saturation, brightness, ttrans.offsets);
	var tstyles = "";
	$.each(ttrans.attributes, function(i, ts) {
		tstyles += ts + ": " + newColor + ";";
	});
	tmpTransforms += ttrans.selector + "{ " + tstyles + " } ";
});

if ($.browser.msie) { // *sigh*
	ieStyle.cssText = tmpTransforms;
}
else {
	$("style[title='colshift']").text(tmpTransforms);
}

Anyway the result is that you a) get a better, easier to use syntax for applying the changes to page elements, and b) can be safe in the knowledge the styles will be applied to all elements on the page (even generated ones)  just like CSS should be. Enjoy!