Developing for 18xx.games

Getting Started

Set up your development environment using the information in DEVELOPMENT.md

Adding new games

Source of JSON for new games: 18xx-maker

Directory structure

• meta.rb - Metadata, player count etc
• game.rb - Main game code
• map.rb - Tiles and maps constants needed for the game (just constants)
• entities.rb - Corporations and companies needed for the game (just constants)

Developing on Windows

This section will show you how to setup a development environment on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Core tools

First, install WSL 2 using this guide.

Next, install Docker Desktop and configure it to use WSL 2 by following this guide.

Make sure you add your non privileged user on your WIN10 System to the docker users group in WIN10 via the Computer Management -> User Management otherwise if you use a non privileged user account on your machine (which you should for day to day work) the Docker for Desktop APP will not start.

At this point, you can develop directly in your preferred Linux distro or in VSCode using the "Remote - WSL" extension.

Additional configuration

Docker Desktop for Windows expects the path for volumes to be /c/; however, by default, WSL uses /mnt/c/. Nick Janetakis has an excellent guide on how to resolve this issue.

And that's it! If you want the web server to automatically pick-up code changes, make sure to run out of your Linux home directory. A known issue with WSL 2 is that changes on the Windows file system will not be detected.

Moving WSL and Docker VHDs to a different disk

If running low on disk space on default C: drive and you want to move the large linux and docker VHDs to a different drive:

1. You can move some or all of these VHDs (you can see them with wsl --list)
          Ubuntu (or whatever linux distro you're using - 4gb)
          docker-desktop (150mb)
          docker-desktop-data (9gb)
2. Use these instructions
3. Important: import into three separate directories because the filenames are all the same. For example
          d:\wsl\ubuntu
          d:\wsl\docker-desktop
          d:\wsl\docker-desktop-data
4. In Docker Desktop, under Settings - Resources - WSL Integration, you may need "enable integration for additional distros" for Ubuntu if it doesn't end up as the default distro
5. You may need to log out and back in to kick Docker Desktop to restart
6. You may now have to start wsl with 'ubuntu' not 'wsl', otherwise home directory is not set up right

At this point, VS Code can find files again, and you can successfully 'make' to build and run the server.

There you go, 14gb of VHDs moved in about 10 minutes.

Developing on Macbooks with Apple M1 / M1 Pro / M1 Max chip

Unfortunately some modules don't fully support Apple Silicon chips so you need some preparations:

1. Edit Dockerfile, replacing FROM in line 1 with FROM --platform=linux/amd64
2. Create a file named .rerun with following line in it --force-polling
3. Follow usual steps on starting the app

Architecture of Design

Backend - lib/engine/

Frontend (UI) - assets/app/

Advice

• Try and avoid massive PRs. They're very difficult to review.
• Be careful of floating point numbers the ruby code tends to run as ints, the javascript code runs as floats.
• Keep performance in mind when implementing games. Use your browser performance tracker to find hotspots in your code. The ruby -> opal bridge is not optimized so some methods cause a lot of GC like any? vs empty?.

Submitting Edits

• Make sure you run docker-compose exec rack rake before submitting your PR
• To automatically fix Rubocop violations: docker-compose exec rack rubocop -a

Testing

• To access a pre-alpha game, use ?all in URL [e.g. http://localhost:9292/new_game?all]

Image files

• Optimize image files before submitting them. Inkscape: Optimized SVG when saving (depends on scour). Usually best compression rate: nano (remove xmlns:v="https://vecta.io/nano" from files afterwards). For batch optimization check out image_optim.
• If you only have jpg or png files you can use inkscape's autotrace or an online tool like pngtosvg to convert to svg.
• If you need to export multiple icons from one svg file try multipage export.
• There’s a script to generate simple logos: scripts/generate_logos.rb

Troubleshooting

Weird messages after updating code

Run make clean to force a rebuild of frontend javascript files under public/assets/, then rerun [either open any .rb-file and save to trigger a rerun or make dev_up_b]

Docker Make not working

ERROR: Couldn't connect to Docker daemon at http+docker://localhost - is it running?

1. Try running with sudo or adding the user to the docker group (+ logout/-in)
2. Try running systemctl start docker

Browser not seeing updated code

You need to completely clear the browser's cache. On Chrome: <ctrl><shift>R

Make on Windows not working

On Windows, if you get a make error like this:

• ./scripts/data_dir.sh docker
• make: ./scripts/data_dir.sh: Command not found

the solution is to locate project files on the WSL Linux homedir and not a windows drive.

Hotseat: Made an illegal move and want to remove it

• a=JSON.parse(window.localStorage['hs_fhsvpepp_1599508832'])
• a.actions.pop()
• window.localStorage['hs_fhsvpepp_1599508832']=JSON.stringify(a)
• Refresh your browser

Hotseat: Push a move (be careful)

hotseat='hs_fhsvpepp_1599508832'
a=JSON.parse(window.localStorage[hotseat])
new_action = {
      "type": "program_buy_shares",
      "entity": "Player 3",
      "entity_type": "player",
      "id": 8,
      "created_at": 1613076234,
      "corporation": "AR",
      "until_condition": "float"
    }
new_action.id=a.actions[a.actions.length-1].id
a.actions.push(new_action)
window.localStorage[hotseat]=JSON.stringify(a)