[mathgladiator]

As I age, I realize the importance of it based on people I know.

I am pondering two things at the moment.

(1) how to introduce high contrast for important details. There is a lot of cosmetic noise in board games, and I'm looking at how to rendering JSON into an image. What annotations can guide this rendering such that important details are more obvious.

(2) of what I'm looking at, what is the (a) important stuff right now and (2) what happened. If I can make it easy to describe the picture with words, then not only can I solve the problem for blind people but I can bring home assistants into the picture.

For (2), I can solve (a) easy enough. For (b), I'm still sorting that out since I am playing with my hands behind my back. Like, I can describe things as "cards entered your hand" or "cards left your hand", but I'm struggling to figure out how to distinguish between "you got two cards from the deck" versus "you took a card from Zem into your hand". Similarly, I'm having the same problem as "you trashed a card" versus "you discarded a card", and I'm struggling with the in-between for animation. The core reason for this problem is that the client just sees an array changing in elements, and I don't know the origin or destination for those elements. My hope is that if I can solve this, then I get both the change-log and animation within a unified idea.

[zem]

is it too expensive to send an event log to the client and have it be replayed? i did that for a stateless scrabble bot and it worked out pretty well, the bot got an event log from the server, replayed it to construct a board position, and sent back a move which was added to the event log sent to the other player.

[mathgladiator]

that's what I am doing, but my events are data transformations with zero game-context. For instance, I have an array that goes from [1,2,5,7] (card ids in your hand). I will know that array will change into [1,2,5], and that's great. However, why did it change? Did I play a card? was a card taken from my hand? Did I trash a card?

The immediate problem is how do I animate the card going away? The next question is how do I convert that to text like "You drew a card" versus "You stole a card from player X"

Now, ideally, I want to make this very simple and also privacy respecting as well. I can hack the card animation problem directly by having the UI detect connect the dots between cards appearing and being orphaned. This may be good enough for many scenarios.

Another thing I'm thinking about is contextualizing the events the client sends (which do have more domain context). This is probably the right way to go, but this adds a new layer to think about.

[zem]

it would work better if the event was something like "PLAY, played=7, drawn=K, trashed=K, hand=[1,2,5]" with the client perhaps validating that applying the play does lead to the hand [1,2,5] as an error correction mechanism.

you need to make sure not to leak information about one player's hidden moves to another player, of course, but in general i would say have your events be as rich as possible so that clients can interpret them for animations, screen reading etc.

edit: for reference, this is the format scrabble programs have standardised on for their event log: https://www.poslfit.com/scrabble/gcg/