Progress of Spice Trade, 4D Maze and Domino on Acid

I started with a couple of old, abandoned Java games more (Spice Trade, 4D Maze and Domino on Acid) and I got quickly past the initial stage. I could easily convert them to build with Gradle. Only Spice Trade did not immediately start but after specifying updated dependencies it did and I could easily run static code analyses on these projects and improve a couple of things without really changing how the programms work.

Start screen of Spice Trade

Interesting is that they all have about the same size (8-12k lines of Java code). That might be kind of a sweet spot in terms of what can be achieved and what is manageable and codeable within a reasonable time by a very small team or single person.

I identified issues that are common and I hope that I can exploit lots of synergies there and improve many games (apps) at the same time. The list includes:

• Localization with properties and resource bundles
• Swing (they all are based on Swing) helper utilities and UI modularization
• Persistent options/settings storage.
  
• Display HTML based help/documentation pages.
• Storage/serialization of game state data.
• Deployment of the apps for various OS systems.
• Logging support
• Meaningful tests
• Adapting display size to modern screen resolutions (full screen mode)
  

FreeRails: Current screenshot

0.4.1 - Main screen

Here is another screen shot of the current version. It doesn't look much different from the last screenshot. Maybe it's just to prove that all the recent changes in the code (mostly refactoring and deleting unused code) didn't break anything important.

Civil: Screenshots of 0.84

The main screen

This is the main screen as it looked in 2004 but in 2018.

FreeRails: Images from 0.2.6

The main screen.

The graphics is a bit outdated, mostly 2005-like with Swing as Java GUI framework and simple graphics optimized for screens of lower resolution as nowadays. But at least it runs almost out of the box in 2017 thanks to Java and the JVM.