General info.

Virtual board for playing "Lines of action" abstract board game and analyzing games from LittleGolem gaming site.

Game rules can be read on Wikipedia.

Currently only standard 8x8 LOA is supported. More variants ("9x9 Black hole", "Scrambled eggs", etc.) and game servers (BrainKing) should be added later.

The board is implemented in CoffeeScript. The very simple server-side is implemented in Ruby (using Sinatra).

A set of libraries used so far:

• Raphaёl -- for game graphics and animation.
• Knockout.js -- for structuring the code, introducing data model in UI using MVVM pattern.
• jQuery -- for querying the DOM.
• Underscore.js -- convenient functional-style helpers.
• QUnit.js -- for unit testing.
• Bootstrap -- CSS/JS components.

How to set up the server locally and contribute to LOA board development.

1. The server side is written in Ruby as a very simple Web application for Sinatra. Thus, first we need to install Ruby. In order not to interact with any system-wide installation of Ruby you already have, we can install our own sandboxed version of Ruby. We can do this using rbenv tool.

   Use you package manager to install rbenv, for further details please see here. You can also do the same with RVM.

2. Then when we have rbenv, we can install a version of Ruby plus Ruby gems needed for LOA board server. First, Ruby itself:

    rbenv install 2.0.0-p353
   

3. Then we need to install the following Ruby gems:

    gem install sinatra thin shotgun
   

4. The client side is written in Coffee Script (a language which is compiled to JavaScript and basically just provides some syntactics sugar around JavaScript to make it more pleasant to read and write). So we will need to install CoffeeScript compiler as well. Please take a look at its web page to learn how to install it (you'll need Node.JS for it ;)).

5. Finally, we can start our own web server and start serving the LOA board application locally! To do this, run:

    rake serve
   

   You should see something like this:

    sphynx@fanorona $ rake serve
    shotgun app.rb
    == Shotgun/Thin on http://127.0.0.1:9393/
    Thin web server (v1.6.1 codename Death Proof)
    Maximum connections set to 1024
    Listening on 127.0.0.1:9393, CTRL+C to stop
   

6. Then you open your browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:9393/ to open LOA board. If you want to load a game from LittleGolem, you can use the following address (with a particular game ID from LittleGolem):

   http://127.0.0.1:9393/lg/1734189

7. If you want to change the client code and immediately see the results (by hust reloading the page in browser), we can run the following Rake task to start on-the-fly recompiling of CoffeeScript code:

    rake coffee_fly
   

8. Then, we can, for example, go to coffee/board.coffee source file, open it in your favourite editor and change the color of black pieces to be actually black:

    BLACK_CHECKER_COLOR = "black"
   

9. If you have your tasks (rake coffee_fly and rake serve) running in the background then you can just reload the page in the browser to see immediate effect (the color should be changed from red to black).

10. There are other useful Rake tasks, for example rake test which runs tests and opens the test report. You can get the full list of tasks using rake -D.

11. Please feel free to contribute via GitHub pull requests any features from TODO list or anything else you'd like to improve.