JVPC home Screenshots Download FAQ Project Page To Do Bugs People Kero's VGAP-page

The JVPC Home-Page

SourceForge Logo

JVPC is the Java VGA- Planets Client. VGA-Planets is a multi-player, economy, diplomacy, warfare and strategy game for up to 11 players, developed by Tim Wisseman.

JVPC offers features that are completely new into the world of VGA-Planets. Always accompanying is VPCheck, which can perform Checks and Actions.

Please Note:

Status

Everything a basic client requires is implemented (from v0.93 on). Read the (incomplete) list of Current Features. There are some features that other clients don't have!

PLANETS.EXE and MAKETURN.EXE can handle data written by JVPC.) The internal consistency checker prevents a lot of trouble. VPUTIL.EXE has second thoughts, sometimes.

I use JVPC in (THost) Threat of Darkness we play on efnet#vgaplanets without trouble. It survives (Phost) blitzes we hold once a few months. That's a very good way to test stability and such. Usually a few small things pop up, but nothing really prevents me from playing.

History

Through a set of Pascal files Rutger and I acquired knowledge of the VGA-Planets data-files. I switched to C and wrote K-Unpack, K-MakeTurn and K-Util version 0.5. This release lacked configurability. So I went on with version 0.9 and changed that. Then I encountered C++ and thought that it would be nice if... But no, it wasn't.

Now we're tackling Java, which has as main advantage built-in graphical support. It is somewhat slower than other languages, but JVM's are improving fast, as well as your average CPU. We set up a class-hierarchy for all data and I started typing. My first excercise was a zoomable starmap, which functioned well. A list of current features.

Future

JVPC now contains everything a basic client needs. With RVV as intelligent viewer, let's be honest, there isn't much need for JVPC to become smarter.

With JVC gaining momentum, JVPC should cover ground that JVC doesn't. JVPC is much more portable (runs jdk 1.1 to 1.4, including Personal Java) and knows more about PHost. That is where you should look for focus, not in all kinds fancy things to copy vpa, jvc, echoview and definitely nothing that's already in rvv.

However, JVPC is free software, so you can always implement missing features yourself, see the To Do list for things that could be done.

Documentation

Some first attempt on documenting and describing the features of JVPC and VPCheck are here on-line:

The best way to get more lines in these documentation is to ask me questions (or I might add them to the FAQ :-)
Kero
27 Jul 2003