Sinat - Graphics revised and computer algorithm enhanced

I've recently updated the graphics of my Egyptian game Sínat to look more 3D. I got tired of the flat, spartan look of the Flash game and decided to fiddle around with a 3D modeler called Swift3D to see what better things I could come up with.


Also, I've updated the strategy of the computer which I believe may be better than what I have so far. My new algorithm, which I call Seth (named after the Egyptian god of storms and chaos), first checks to see if there are any pieces to switch with the opponent. If no switching is possible, it moves the first piece closest to the end that can legally be moved. Of course, all of my programs now automatically avoid Par Maw (the water square) at all costs since its a penalty square. After testing 25 games, the new algorithm won 68% of the time against Lateesha, the "retarded monkey" algorithm that moves completely by random. Not only does it win more of the time but it wins by an average of two pieces against random play. Adaptation makes me giddy.

Sproutbuilder ate my Flash game

Warning: The following will be a scary tech rant about how peeved I am at my recently disappearing Sinat boardgame on my blog and this business about what I call "Flashphobia". If you're not a Star Trek-loving geek like me, you may get bored with this post.

Anyways, it's looking now like Sprout Builder decided to go to a "paid model" and in the process destroyed any content links I or anyone else had associated with the company to effectively boost its traffic. Evil marketing? Just possibly. But possibly also bad marketing. At any rate, now my Egyptian Sinat boardgame I coded for you all is just *blank* when you go to my Extras page to the right. Thanks Sprout Builder for erasing my content. I'll be sure to sign up for your service... in hell.

Now I have to search for someone, ANYONE, that will house flash files for free (just like they do for pics and text) without imposing an irritating limit on format type for no clear reason. Blogger won't allow flash files. I can't even figure out what the big fear is about Flash programs when we have so many evil websites underhandedly exploiting HTML/CSS bugs that introduce viruses onto our computers every day. Why then is Flash so particularly evil? Because it introduces functionality to otherwise drab websites? Whatever.

Seriously, does anyone know where one can put their Flash programs on some free account without idiot marketers pulling the rug under their feet and forcing pay models down their throats? And what's wrong with Google that it can't do this? Picasa is effectively a picture storage system so where's the flash storage system of my dreams? Did I miss a memo somewhere or is the internet retarded? Grrrr.

And that's the end of my geek rant for now. Hehehe.


UPDATES
(Meanwhile an hour later...) AHA! Eureka! I've uploaded my game's swf file to my new Google Sites account...

http://sites.google.com/site/paleoglot/Home/sinat.swf

...and this seems to link alright {crossing fingers}. Tell me, viewers, if you have any problems accessing the game. If everything is okay, then I guess Google does supply a solution to Blogger's lack of services, albeit a really friggin' convoluted one for even veteran computer programmers to wrap their noodle around.

Revisal to my Sinat game

Just a quick heads-up about a revisal of my Sínat game. After one commenter, Hans, rightly noted that the probability distribution of numbers thrown by the four ancient Egyptian casting sticks were not the same as the even distribution of a die, I went to work readapting the game to reflect this.

My game now allows multiple moves whenever 1, 4 or 5 is thrown. This better reflects Kendall's original rules which are apparently inspired in part by a similar modern Arabic game called Tâb. I honestly had never conceived that there would be a difference between sticks and dice. I just blindly assumed that numbers should show up with equal frequency which made the extra turns on 1, 4 and 5 too obscure a rule for me to include but all that's changed.

For those interested in the programmatical solution to this, it's merely a matter of telling the computer to find a random number from 0 to 15 which in binary is represented as the numbers from 0000 to 1111. By conceiving of the four sticks as a single binary number of four bits, we can then isolate any particular bit with boolean bitwise operators and add up the total of 1's. We also have to remember to convert 0000 to "5" since this represents the four sticks facing down.

An Ancient Egyptian boardgame to appease readers

After a shamelessly long period of inactivity here on Paleoglot due to partying, Valentine's Day, joining the Aegeanet forum (possibly to my chagrin), a bit of laziness, a nasty chest cold, and obsessively programming my own game of Sínat (an ancient Egyptian boardgame) while experimenting with the Adobe-Flash-yumminess of Sprout Builder, I have yet to reorganize my blogsite like I wanted to and categorize my various files and such (Etruscan Dictionary pdf, hypotheses on Pre-Proto-Indo-European, and now this Sinat game) under more easily accessible links from the main page. Unfortunately there are only 24 hours in a day, yet I need 8 to 10 hours of sleep or else I get crabby. Go figure!

At any rate, for now, please help me test out my game (the link is down below). Some of you may be confused by my spelling of the name. Normally people spell it "Senet" but this is the annoying "Sir Budge" way of bastarding the Egyptian language by lazily imposing the vowel "e" between written consonants. Remember, afterall, Egyptian seldom indicated vowels in hieroglyphics unless writing foreign names like that of the legendary Ptolemy known as Cleopatra who was of Macedonian heritage. The name of the game literally means "passing" and since it's related to Coptic šina "to pass", the name in Middle Egyptian (that is, the language as it was spoken around 1500 BCE or so) may be reconstucted as *sínat.

I have lots more to say about this interesting game such as mythical symbolisms subtlely embedded into the design of the game, Kendall's rules on which I base my program, some minor reinterpretations of game rules that I needed to impose while coding the details in order to keep it from being laborious, etc., etc. Consider this game a "beta" version and I'm aware of some bugs (e.g. the "Roll Dice" button flashes pointlessly in computer vs. computer mode) but despite my hideous programming, I believe it should now be playable with a friend or alone with the computer without exploding. However, fear not, friends. This is *not* the final product yet and I will be making modifications to the programming and visual aesthetics as I go along until I'm reasonably satisfied that I've ironed out all usability issues. As I said, the rules are more or less that of Timothy Kendall and a short primer of them can be learned from this link. I use the 5-pawn variant rather than 7 although it sounds like 5, 7 or even 10 pawns were used by Ancient Egyptians.

Now relax yourself this weekend and...

Try a game of Sínat!

Sinat (Ancient Egyptian Boardgame)