War 2.0

Introduction

After seven years of organic growth, the BattleMaster codebase has become more and more difficult to maintain. The number of bugs is way beyond what I consider acceptable, and new features are more difficult to add than they should be. More importantly, changes to the game structure result in breakage all over the place.

The only way out of this mess is a code refactoring, and a cleanup of some game structures. And while we're at it, let's bring BattleMaster into the 21st century:

BattleMaster meets "Web 2.0"

A proof-of-concept already exists. BattleMaster can be:

• XHTML 1.0 compliant
• well-structured according to the MVC concept
• gain added functionality such as client-side table sorting or some AJAX
• and still remain the same easy and accessible game

After some searching, I have decided upon the CodeIgniter framework as the base for a refactored codebase.

BattleMaster needs You

And this is where I can't do things on my own anymore. Look at [SLOCCount] and you see that we're talking almost 50,000 lines of code here. Refactoring that is more than one man can do while retaining job, girl and sanity. :-)

If you are either

• a PHP programmer, familiar with CodeIgniter or at least with MVC and a quick learner,
• or a HTML/CSS/graphics designer who believes in standards and always wanted to improve the BM user-interface

Then yell. Yell loudly and yell to [1] - because I need you. BattleMaster needs you. I can not do this on my own.

What's the deal? I can not yet say for sure, so if you have specific ideas, talk to me. You will:

• be a part of the team that brings BattleMaster to the next level
• get full credits for your work
• be among the first to see (and shape) the new BattleMaster

everything beyond that will be discussed among the team once we assembled it.

You must be:

• reliable and trustworthy
• willing to accept that I'm giving you access to what took seven years of my life to create, and that means I'll seem protective and weird in some aspects
• put everything you ask for your work on the table up front. If you want goodies, special credits or money, we can talk about that before we start working with each other.

So again, if you can and want to help, mail [2] and let us see where we go from there.