Monopoly

chickendude · Post by **chickendude** » Wed 12 Jul, 2006 4:38 pm

Thanks

chickendude · Post by **chickendude** » Wed 12 Jul, 2006 4:45 pm

"Know when and where to build houses and hotels

Building advances your ability to bankrupt your opponents. Many players build all they can afford. However, this strategy results in losses when houses must be torn down to pay rents or other penalties often.

You should build when you form the first complete color group.

You should build when you can do so and still be left with enough cash to pay a "high probability" expense - namely, rents on Railroads or Utilities, Luxury Tax, and the "nasty" unexposed Community Chest or Chance cards. $150 to $200 is all the cash you need to hold onto if there are no other complete color groups against you. $300 to $400 in cash is recommended if there are one or more complete color groups developed against you.

You should build late in the game, in "all or nothing" situations if you think you can financially cripple an opponent by doing so.

When you build, build according to these principles:
Build a color group up to at least three houses per property before you start building on a second color group. (Note that rents rise dramatically once a third house is added to a property.)

If you can afford an extra house, put it on the most expensive property of the color group.

Build up to the fourth house or hotel level only if you have plenty of cash to spare, unless the group is one of the first three on the board (Dark Purple, Light Blue, Light Purple). Due to the low rents of these groups, you should try to build hotels here.

Early in the game, develop a low rent color group as soon as you can in an attempt to bankrupt opponents before "heavier" color groups are developed against you.

When buying a second extra house for a three-property group, put it on the middle property if the group is Light Blue or Orange. Put the house on the first property if the group is Light Purple, Red, Yellow, or Green."

"The most landed on spaces are: Jail, Illinois Avenue, GO and the B.&O. Railroad."

chickendude · Post by **chickendude** » Wed 12 Jul, 2006 5:03 pm

kv83 wrote:- The last streets will be given for free to random players

What do you mean by that? The last streets? How many?

EDIT:
On the first page for my topic post, I've compiled a list of things that I have left to do/suggestions and stuff.

I made a list of various house rules on there as well, but I'll repost them here so you don't have to flip back:
Options:
- All taxes/fees into center pot, land on Free Parking to receive (easy)
- Build houses if all properties sold (regardless of monopoly) (easy)
- The last streets will be given for free to random players?
- $400 for landing on GO (vs 200 for passing it) (easy)
- No rent earned while in jail (easy)
- $686 (one of each bill) bonus for rolling snake eyes
- Unlimited houses and hotels.
- houses cost $50 each, and hotels cost $100 each.
- No "build evenly" restriction on improving properties.
- Not having auctions when a player passes on his chance to buy the property he lands on or neglects to stake his claim.
- Delayed Start: Players must pass GO before they can buy property.
- Properties are auctioned as soon as they are landed on
- All properties are handed out evenly to all players before the game begins, or one or two are dealt to each player.
- The fourth house step in building is skipped (after building three houses, the next step is a hotel)

What do you think, any other suggestions?

Post by **kv83** » Thu 13 Jul, 2006 7:20 am

What do you mean by that? The last streets? How many?

I don't know. Maybe the question is not "how many" but "after how long/how much rounds". I guess that ~15 rounds would be ok, but you could make it so the player can define that value.

chickendude · Post by **chickendude** » Fri 14 Jul, 2006 12:58 pm

Oh, alright. That sounds good. Then add a couple of options below that, like if so, distribute them randomly, evenly, or to the weaker players only, etc.

Or I could have people "draw numbers out of a hat" and then they pick the properties based on the number they picked.?

Well, when I get the actual board scripts down, I'll just be sure to leave room so that the various different options can intervene.

chickendude · Post by **chickendude** » Sat 15 Jul, 2006 2:47 pm

Well, I worked on it for the last time in a while last night, and got a whole bunch of progress. The pieces now "follow the board" (in the new version, I hadn't fully implemented the player animation routine yet, which is now complete, and in the old edition, the player moved in 16 pixel jumps, regardless. Now the player follows the map, I'll post a screenie when I get the chance.)
Tonight I'll be working on fully implementing the dice routine, and having that spit out two numbers, one for the total of the dies, and one for the players position on the board which I can then use to determine what action to take (chance, purchase a property, collect 200, etc.) Once the dice routine has been finished, I'll post a new screenie up here

Progress is going slowly but surely.

CompWiz · Post by **CompWiz** » Sat 15 Jul, 2006 7:56 pm

sounds good, it's always nice to hear the progress, and I'm looking forward to the screenies. So, how much work do you have left to do?

Madskillz · Post by **Madskillz** » Sun 16 Jul, 2006 1:21 am

Awe man...did I read new screenies!!! I can wait chickendude!

chickendude · Post by **chickendude** » Sun 16 Jul, 2006 3:36 am

Well, really, I've got quite a bit of work left. I haven't implemented any interaction with the board (as in going to the chance routine when you land on the chance tile) but I've got an idea in my head. Once I get that system taken care of, I'll probably start working on reformatting everything to handle multiple players and then the purchasing/selling of property. Once that's done, I have like a stats sort of screen in mind where you can see which properties you own, how much money you have, all that stuff. When everything else is taken care of, then I'll start working on my "intelligent" AI. What I have done right now is the basic framework, now I have to add in all the intricacies that make the game unique from every other tilemap.

Oh, and I'm planning to redo the tilemap data so that it doesn't take up quite so much space. But that's minor stuff.

One thing's for sure, I'm going to have a terrible time trying to optimize all this code when it's done with, it's soo messy!

chickendude · Post by **chickendude** » Mon 17 Jul, 2006 6:14 pm

83 Version
83+ Version

Don't get excited or anything, very little is completed. I just need your feedback on what's good, what's bad, etc.

Also, I'm going to try to add in some sort of character selection today, but first I'm going to try to make the characters grayscale (they're very difficult to see right now.)

All that works is starting a game and rolling the dice, really.
Eh but whatever you can at least see what I've done so far.

And I think the scrolling is too fast, but I'm not quite sure how to incorporate smooth scrolling so slowing it down looks really blocky.

Well, just give me your opinion if you could. Thanks

EDIT: It is also incredibly large for being this early in the game. I'm really upset about how large it is, so I might start taking some time off of actual programming to try and cut down on erraneous code.

CompWiz · Post by **CompWiz** » Mon 17 Jul, 2006 8:07 pm

oooh, a demo.

I'll give it a try when I get home. And releasing a small demo isn't bad. I rather liked Wakamolking's questquest demo, and that was very limited as well.

chickendude · Post by **chickendude** » Mon 24 Jul, 2006 2:47 am

So last night, after basically getting the grayscale and everything to work, I decided that it just wasn't worth it. The size was much too large to be reasonable.

So after I finished converting it to grayscale, I changed everything back to black and white and went to bed.

This morning, I wrote up some pseudo code for the tilechecking routine and started implementing it. I'll see if I can get some basic structures to it working and upload a new demo. Everything's working very well, so it shouldn't be that difficult.

Later.

EDIT: I just downloaded the other monopoly for the 83+, and it was very encouraging. Its size was over 9k, which leaves me a good 3 or 4k to fill up before going over his size.

tifreak8x · Post by **tifreak8x** » Mon 24 Jul, 2006 9:43 pm

This looked really good in PTI. I do agree that the scrolling is a bit fast, but I am not an asm programmer, so I really don't have any suggestions on how to slow it down and make it look correct. Maybe scroll 1 or 2 pxls at a time, with a slight delay??

As to size:

If you make this game really well, and it plays as good or better than the original, than I don't mind paying a bit of extra memory for a game like this.

chickendude · Post by **chickendude** » Tue 25 Jul, 2006 2:31 am

Yea, I'm looking into a pseudo scrolling sort of thing. I'll probably shift the entire screen a pixel or two, then load in the missing bits from some sort of buffer, so as to avoid needing a clipping routine.

But now, when you land on a tile it accurately displays it's name. All of the tile information is directly after that, so from here on it should be smooth sailing.

And thanks for the compliment

I'll definitely look into smooth scrolling, because if I slow down the scrolling as it is, it looks too blocky.

Currently, it's sitting at about 5k. The completed (highly) unoptimized multiplayer game shouldn't be more than 8k (the text for the chance cards is just over 900 bytes!), which leaves plenty of room to try and toss in a simple AI and still fit under 9k.

This project will probably roll into next school year as I work on it so scarcely, but once school comes in I'll actually have more time to hit up notepad.

Thanks. And as always, I'll keep you updated.

chickendude · Post by **chickendude** » Tue 25 Jul, 2006 6:43 pm

Is MirageOS still the main shell that people use? I've been looking over the MirageOS routines, and I could shave off thousands of bytes by using them. I like Ion for its compatibility (it's what I've always used, aside from nostub), but there's so many more routines included with Mirage.

What are your thoughts on using Mirage... Yay or nay?