Poker2x First Release!


DaveN

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I've finally finished the fourth milestones of my GP2X Poker game!

poker2x1fp0.png
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poker2x3dt7.png


As you see it's fully themable with custom backgrounds and custom cardsets. It also features an A.I. which randomly generates 7 enemy players with different 'riskyness' and bluffing ability you'll have to beat. The rules are the most common rules found in internet poker, Limit Texas Hold'em.

This is just a first release ( of my first C++ game, by the way ), later releases will include more backgrounds, nicer cardsets and even better AI. There are also other poker variants on the to-do list like Video Poker or No Limit Hold'em. And the next release will have a highscore table secured with an algorythm so you can exchange your highscores without having to mess with those cheaters.

Go grab it here: http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,1,1674


If you wan't to support further releases, please just draw a sweet background, test it on your gp2x and if it looks good send it to me and I'll include it in the next release.

So, have fun, give me some feedback and if you wan't to have a feature included in the next release, first look at the included to-do list and if it isn't listed there, please write it here. BTW, it may be that you win in one round with like 2000$ and in the next round your the same amount in the minus. Poker is mainly a game of luck and since the AI is generated randomly, you may face some very good players and the next time some bad players.

Cheers,
David
 
Just had a quick game as I am a big fan of Texas Hold'em poker :) For first release its good and just about all the things I can think that need to be added are in your todo list. The main features thats missing is showing the actions of the AI and the end of round information on who has won the round etc, I hope they are in the next release as it would make it alot more playable.

Further along the line some music and sfx would be great, the common themes in other poker games is jazz type music so I guess you could follow that :) Also some speech (I love speech in games) would suit this perfectly, if you are interested I might be able to help you out there as I have access to speech generation software.

Anyway, keep up the great work. Its shaping up to be a very nice game and one I will keep on my GP2X for some time.
 
Guyfawkes posted on Jul 24 2006 at 01:37 AM said:
Just had a quick game as I am a big fan of Texas Hold'em poker :) For first release its good and just about all the things I can think that need to be added are in your todo list. The main features thats missing is showing the actions of the AI and the end of round information on who has won the round etc, I hope they are in the next release as it would make it alot more playable.

Further along the line some music and sfx would be great, the common themes in other poker games is jazz type music so I guess you could follow that :) Also some speech (I love speech in games) would suit this perfectly, if you are interested I might be able to help you out there as I have access to speech generation software.

Anyway, keep up the great work. Its shaping up to be a very nice game and one I will keep on my GP2X for some time.

I'm still thinking on how to show which action the AI has done. Putting a small text box over there cards? Writing it below their cards? The same for the last one, but there I think I'll just make a small window pop up in the middle of the screen that tells you this. Or I think that's were the speech you mentioned in the next paragraph would fit in nice. Like a miming of a dealers' voice.
Anyway, this will be in the next release for sure.

On the music side of the things I'll implent a way to load custom music files ( probably in the same way as I'm doing it with the cardsets and the backgrounds now ) and maybe I'll do a basic music. Or use some royalty free stuff or just ask someone about I can use his music since I'm not able to do anything else then midi now, and there I haven't got a good app.

And thanks for the nice words and the offer with the speech, I'll probably contact you tomorrow since I'm not in the mood to do too much now, just was jamming with the band and drinking later.
 
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if you dont want to change the layout too much you could just use some icons to show the AI checking, betting, raising or folding. on the 3rd row where the money betted is shown, beside each players value you could use an Up arrow to show its been raised, a = to show its betted, a finger (tapping on the table) to show its checked, folding is already shown on the cards so probably isnt needed.

a pop up window showing the actions of each player would be a good step further and would make it more obvious whats going on. also, like you said you can add in the commentry speech here.
 
AcidiC posted on Jul 24 2006 at 09:32 AM said:
Would be nice to see what the AI's winning cards were... also if the AI had names :p

That's already on the to-do list, something that I somehow skipped all the time.. Names.. Hmm.. I was thinking about the names should change according to their playing style, or about the names should be completly random.

I think I'll just let a small window pop up ( somewhere over their cards and their money ) everytime an ai has done any kind of action, and after the player pressed any button or waited like 2 or 3 seconds the window will disappear and there will be a small icon next to their bet amount.
At the end of the round will a bigger window pop up ( over the community cards ) that will show the winning hand. Or maybe it could compare your hand with the best ai hand.
Any more input here?

Cheers, David

Edit: The fix still isn't on. Please remember to redownload this thing later, since the flickering things are annoying. At least in my opinion.
 
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I love card games I play them at work....texas hold em i was never any good at lol...but at leats i can practise now thanks.


oh and instead of just adding names could you add like little Gif(example) characters that there faces cvhange when they got a good hand or get mad when they fold. (any1 remember the hoyle card games on the amiga 1200).


and my personal question would you consider making any other card games for the gp2x after like "gin rummy" or pontoon.


cool game.
 
I think I'll just let a small window pop up ( somewhere over their cards and their money ) everytime an ai has done any kind of action, and after the player pressed any button or waited like 2 or 3 seconds the window will disappear and there will be a small icon next to their bet amount.
At the end of the round will a bigger window pop up ( over the community cards ) that will show the winning hand. Or maybe it could compare your hand with the best ai hand.
Any more input here?
I think this would help slow the game down; I let my friend have a play and he said that it was a bit too fast.

With the small window, do you mean something saying that the AI has made a bet, folded, etc? If so I could help with a little animation. (gif?)

The big window sounds good, but make sure it also says which AI won :p. Will the window show 5 cards or 7? (Assuming that we made it to the last round)

oh and instead of just adding names could you add like little Gif(example) characters that there faces cvhange when they got a good hand or get mad when they fold. (any1 remember the hoyle card games on the amiga 1200).

Haha that would be funny.. screen might get a little cramped though

EDIT 362: ONE MORE THING, if you end up making the big window over the common cards, maybe after the round is done some text could pop up saying how much you won/lost. Annoying when I realise money has been slowly draining from my stash :p
 
AcidiC posted on Jul 24 2006 at 01:41 PM said:
(1) I think this would help slow the game down; I let my friend have a play and he said that it was a bit too fast.

(2) With the small window, do you mean something saying that the AI has made a bet, folded, etc? If so I could help with a little animation. (gif?)

(3) The big window sounds good, but make sure it also says which AI won :p. Will the window show 5 cards or 7? (Assuming that we made it to the last round)

(4).
oh and instead of just adding names could you add like little Gif(example) characters that there faces cvhange when they got a good hand or get mad when they fold. (any1 remember the hoyle card games on the amiga 1200).

Haha that would be funny.. screen might get a little cramped though

1. One of the nice side aspects of these things I also thought of.

2. Exactly something like that. But as far as I know, no sdl-library ported to the gp2x supports animated gif's, so that has to be in the 'usual one frame next to the other' format. Would be nice if you could do something in that direction.

3. I just had another idea here. Maybe there could be again windows popping up above the ai's which contain there hole cards and a small text saying what they've got ( 'High-Card Ace' or 'Full House' ) and then the window of the winning player could blink short, and then we'll go to the next round.

4. I think that would kill the overall view of the game screen and also it would get too crowdy. You would have to use some vector like things, since just cutted out bitmaps would look horrible there.

and my personal question would you consider making any other card games for the gp2x after like "gin rummy" or pontoon.
I already thought about BlackJack. But at first I'd like to bring this game here to a good standard. That means it supports custom music (+Speech maybe), a highscore table, the here mentioned feedback for the user and 2 more standard cardsets and at least 5 more standard backgrounds. All of these are things that aren't too hard to do, better said I already got the theoretical side of the code in my head.

After that I'll start one of the other projects lying around here, blackjack, a set of original arcade games in the style of the late 80's and two smaller homebrew games which I'll maybe enter to the community contest. So there'll be another card game earlier or later by me, but I just had a quick look through the board game section, where I just found like three or four card games.. Definitly a hole to fill there.

Edit: Just saw your edit :) That will be inside there. Or maybe there'll be a red or a green number next to your money for a short time that will tell you what you've done with your money. ( Like +150$ or -80$ )
 
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I done a quick background for the game, its supposed to be a green felt design with white outlines. I made the outlines of where the cards go a bit bigger so you can still see them when the cards are shown. If anyone wants the template of the outlines let me know and I will upload it.

I left the space in the center empty as I suck at gfx and wanted to do a 'Poker2X' logo so it looks like a cemi-circle like on casino tables, unfortunately my gfx skills dont go that far so anyone can add it if they want :)

poker2x-bg1.png
 
Nice, will try it as soon as possible. That could also easily be used as a template, it's pretty clean. I'm sorry I haven't provided one yet ( don't know about you ripped the coordinates off or changed an existing background ) but other features were higher on the todo list.

And for the music thingy, just implented it into my version - works fine, but you can completly forget .mp3's. I'm not willing and able to pay that much money just for that. You'll be able to load Ogg, Wav, Mod, Voc, S3m, It and Xm. So the best is just to stick with ogg.
 
heres the template which i made, if you set the transparency to the background colour and copy it over to your proper background it should work fine. i have no idea how to use photoshop so would be easier with that layers thingy people use :)

poker2x-template.png
 
If you want to use ogg's or wav's I can throw some of my solo guitar jazz tunes over to you for this game. In fact, I'd love to do this so let me know if you're interested. They are my tunes, so no problems with licensing etc.
 
I'm playing guitar as well, so I'll be interested in this anyway. But since the electrics of my prefered guitar is broke ( the others don't sound even close as good ), I can't record anything. And also, I'm not really into Jazz. So please send them to me, I'll look about I could include them.

[Edit: Nevermind, found a solution]. Looks like the mac toolkit is out of date. So I recompiled all the libs ( took a lot of my nerves ) I've got a toolchain with the newest libs and all here. So the problem with the fast audio playing is fixed now. Just got myself a big cup of coffe, and added custom names that are generated out of 40 possibilities to the game. I'll probably work this night completly.

On the other side I sucessfully changed to the HW accelerated SDL. The doublebuffer will be useful for animations that my be included. And also _all_ flickering is away now. In-game you won't see the placeholders for the enemy cards anymore. Is much better for the eyes like this.

And thanks for the template guyfawkes. And the background also looks nice on the gp2x.

Cheers, David
 
So, I've been working on the feedback for the user, and after long time of thinking, I've used the method with the small icons next to the cards. As soon as it is this AI's turn, it shows the icon of what it does and then wait's a configurable amount of time. If the player folded, all just runs a bit faster.
Here's a screen of the icons in use. The darker green around the items should be a nice shadow, but somehow that got made a filled color while exporting. Will be changed, for sure.
titleaw8.png

Please tell me what you think about this method. I once implented the one with the popping-up windows, but that get's too crowded and unconfortable for the user. The icons should be self-explaining, if not I may change them. Cross means Fold, arrow up means raise, three arrows right means check, and the last thing ( the last one in the picture - what's the word for that in english? ) means call. I'm not completly sure about the last one, so if someone's got a better idea, please post it.

On the other side I've completed the custom sound (that was the most annoying coding I've ever done, such a dumb bug..), the random names ( using the first and nick names of poker champs and other famous persons ) and some AI tweaking. The next station is the final pop-up window which shows wo won the round, how much he won, with which hand and how much the user lost. Pretty easy since all of the variables for that are already calculated.
 
DaveN -- First, thank you so much for someone finally making a Hold 'em game for the GP2X. This was the game I was seriously waiting for. I actually didn't know how to get in touch with you, as there's no e-mail in the ReadMe files with the release, so I joined just to try to help out.

cards.gif


I made a quick little cardset to help you. I know it's not the greatest set of cards, but I figured different cardsets included with the release might be a nice feature. So, use this, edit it, whatever, as you like. I'm just trying to help out someone who's helping bigger my new favorite game system.

Thanks, man.
 
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