QBoard 20080914

QBoard is a UI for playing near-arbitrary board games. QBoard is mainly intended as a testing platform for playing board game designs.

Main features:>
- A simple interface for quickly setting up and playing a boardgame.
- Has powerful and flexible save and load features, making it easy to add load/save support for new data types.
- Get right to playing - there is no tedious separate setup of "gameset" and "scenario" files, as there is in, e.g., CyberBoard (arguably the most well-known application in this category).
- Has no inherent limits on how many pieces can be in play. It has been shown to easily handle more than 500 at a time.
- As QBoard has only a fluid concept of what a "game" is, it is possible to mix and match pieces from arbitrary Gamesets in the same session.
- A zoomable, rotatable playing area (game board + pieces).
- Full control over game piece background colors, transparency, rotation, and border (color, transparency, size, line style). Finally: translucent game pieces!
- Supports an arbitrary number of dockable "minimap" views, all fully interactive and synchronized in real time.
- On-board HTML widgets, so you can annotate your game as much as you like. You can also attach HTML widgets directly to arbitrary game pieces.
- On-board "dots", with varying sizes and transparency, can be used as pieces by themselves or e.g. as state markers.
- On-board lines, with customizable colors, line size, and transparency level. Useful for marking movement paths (or histories), firing ranges or arcs, line of sight, and such.
- Pieces can have "child objects" which follow them around when the piece is dragged. e.g. one can add a text label, a record form, or status markers to any piece.
- Use copy, paste, and cloning to quickly set up an army of pieces.
- "Shuffle" any items by selecting several items and using the Shuffle menu option. Useful for cards, simulating a cup of chits, and randomizing piece selection or placement.
- JavaScript bindings are under developement. The basic stuff works, but this work is ongoing.
- Built-in wiki viewer which supports most of the wiki syntax provided by Google Code Wiki (e.g. this page).

System requirements:
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Enhancements:
- RSI is acting up from all the typing the past weeks (during the days at work, and 8-10 hours/night at home). i dont know if ill be able to code much the next few weeks.
- The app essentially does everything i want it to do. Most of what i want to do now is refinement.
- The JS bindings need some re-thought, and i think im going to strip out the current work and start from scratch on those, basing the bindings off of the work from the Qt Script Generator project. That will take more time than i can currently commit to, though.