Game for learning Symbols/Vocabulary

[jaded samurai]

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[Hugh]

How can we be sure this isn't malware?

[edelweis]

hmm I have to say I'm curious to know who minused East Asia Student's comment and plussed the original post. (apparently someone restored the 0/0 count since I read this earlier heh!).

Anyway I tried this "game" last week on my linux PC and it apparently did nothing :blink: . So I'd like some explanation too.

[jaded samurai]

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[edelweis]

I have Fedora 11 (it's free, you just need some free disk space to install it or whatever newer version - or you could use one of those CD or USB key versions of linux that do not require installation)

$ java -version

java version "1.6.0_0"

OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.6) (fedora-23.b16.fc10-i386)

OpenJDK Server VM (build 14.0-b16, mixed mode)

and java does work, I use jmemorize with it no problem.

Only "java -jar Chinese\ Farm.jar" just did nothing. Spooky

[Hugh]

I don't actually think it was malware, I was just pointing out that you might not get a huge response posting executables on a forum.

I'm on Linux Mint 10 here, java 1.6.0_24. If I run the game file as instructed, nothing happens.

[boxcar]

I tried the demo on a Windows machine and it worked fine. I don't think it turned my PC into a bot or stole my credit card information.

[jaded samurai]

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[wezel]

Thanks for all the operating system discussion. Are there any out there that have tried the game? Does it work? Is it fun?

[Hugh]

We do care I'd like to see this working.

[jaded samurai]

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[Hugh]

OK so it starts and works now, looks pretty cool, but unfortunately when I try to run a solo game, it says "Attempting to connect" for a while, and then "Could not connect to host. (Press Escape)." And pressing escape doesn't seem to do anything.

加油！

[edelweis]

It looks like SELinux (the security thing) is unhappy about something, and the app does not start at all.

$ java -Djava.library.path="." -jar f.jar

中文农田

20 spells loaded.

5 decks loaded.

Fri Apr 15 12:57:51 CEST 2011 INFO:Initialising sounds..

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /home/edelweis/下载/Demo/liblwjgl.so: /home/edelweis/下载/Demo/liblwjgl.so: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied

at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)

at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1747)

at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1672)

at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:840)

at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:1047)

at org.lwjgl.Sys$1.run(Sys.java:75)

at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)

at org.lwjgl.Sys.doLoadLibrary(Sys.java:68)

at org.lwjgl.Sys.loadLibrary(Sys.java:84)

at org.lwjgl.Sys.<clinit>(Sys.java:101)

at org.lwjgl.openal.AL.<clinit>(AL.java:59)

at org.newdawn.slick.openal.SoundStore$1.run(SoundStore.java:295)

at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)

at org.newdawn.slick.openal.SoundStore.init(SoundStore.java:292)

at org.newdawn.slick.Sound.<init>(Sound.java:54)

at Engine.Audio.LoadSounds(SourceFile:81)

at Engine.Main.main(SourceFile:60)

[jaded samurai]

@ East Asia Student

Huh well, the solo-game works the same as a multiplayer game. You host a server and try and connect to yourself. It's possible that because of your firewall settings you can't connect to yourself. The default port is 666, which, for solo games, there's no way to change it.

@ edelweis

Nothing I can do about that :I

[CrassPip]

I was able to run this on an intel MacBook with OS X 10.6.7 by just unraring and double clicking "China Farm.jar"

At first, I just got a black screen with music, but eventually the instructions came up. My laptop is about 4 years old, so rather slow..

When I try to play the solo game, I also get a connection error. Are you using "localhost" as the host name for solo games?

This seems like an excellent idea and a great start! I'm excited to see it working better.

From the parts I've seen, i have some notes for you:

You'd probably do better distributing a zip than a rar, as unzipping does not require additional software but unrarring does.

The menu bar title is "Engine.Main", not very appealing.

If possible, I'd also use different keys than F1-8, as macs have these assigned to other functions like volume and brightness by default.

Page 4 of the intro, the second bullet misspells Cultivation.

Page 7 intro, misspelled "positive", and Mirror's description sounds odd, rather "The next spell you cast..." or "Your next cast spell..."

I'd also think the clickable words on the menu should appear more obviously button-like.

When I do "host" it seems odd that the message it displays is "attempting to connect". Isn't it in fact waiting for a client?

if I then try "connect" on another instance of the app, I see the host registered by my external ip address, but I was not able to connect. I'm not sure if my router filters out that port or not..

Hope this is useful.

-Dusty

[jaded samurai]

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[Gleaves]

I just played a few rounds. This is a pretty complicated game with all the spells and whatnot, nicely done. I'm curious what the best spell set would be. I was pretty proud of myself for beating the computer 198-0 on very easy only to get pummeled 220-3 on very hard.

Edit: Just some quick other thoughts.

Short cloze sentences might work well. Something like 他__高. a.的 b. 是 c.很 d.得

It could be cool to have gold questions or attack questions (where you get gold or attack the enemy for correct answers, respectively).

[michaelS]

this is great. at first i thought i'd prefer just questions without the farm element, but i got quite into it after that.

i played it on the java applet, where you get Numbers 1, Animals 1, Food 1, Drinks and Vegetables 1. Is there any more on the downloadable version, or is the extra stuff only on the pay-for version?

[jaded samurai]

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