DipInit - Diplomacy Country Allocator

September 11, 2008 - Diplomacy, Games, Software

Just uploaded a new application to the site: DipInit, a Diplomacy Country Allocator. This is not only my first Mac application I wrote but something damn useful for Diplomacy players as well.

The problem is always the same: Once you found seven players to get a game going you need to allocate the seven countries that can be played. You can do that by random but why not do it based on the priority by which the players want to play each country? Good idea but what happens when two or more players want to play the same country? This is where DipInit kicks in!

You simply enter the players’ names and the priorities of the players for each country in the respective boxes where priorities range from 1 for most favorite to 7 for least favorite. After entering the necessary information you simply click a button and DipInit will then calculate the best distribution of countries for the given priorities using an algorithm and finally display the results.

There’s already a Windows application managing this, called DipCountry, but well, it’s only a Windows application and honestly: What person, who is even remotely sane, still uses Windows nowadays?

If you want to give DipInit a spin you can find more information on the respective page or simplay download it straight away.

Writing this application really got me hooked to Objective-C, Cocoa, Xcode and Mac coding in general. Guess I should be writing more stuff for everyones favorite OS or isn’t it everyones favorite yet?

Comments

Comment by Pauk - September 13, 2008 @ 11:56 am

Hey I’d be interested in what you’ve got to say about Xcode and Mac coding. I installed it ages ago but just haven’t got round to tinkering with it!

Comment by Gom Jabbar - September 15, 2008 @ 3:05 pm

Then you should start tinkering with it!

Objective-C was a bit strange at first but not that bad once you got used to it.

The Interface Builder is pretty brilliant in my humble opinion, the only problem being that many of the available tutorials refer to an older version of Interface Builder so you can’t really follow them step by step. Not that much of a problem once you got used to it, though.

Xcode in general is pretty nice. A pity it’s not supporting more languages. It’s surely not as extensible as Eclipse for example but does a damn good job at what it’s capable of.

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