Simon Morris's Blog: November 2007 Archive

It's a creepy thought, but hidden amidst the garish flickering displays and eternal night of some far flung casino there may still stand a Video Poker machine running code written by yours truly. It's been the best part of a decade and half, but the industry as I recall it was never fond of re-inventing the wheel. Y'see for Poker machines 'unit testing' (as we now know it) didn't result in simple pass or fail outcomes, but in a slew of figures detailing how the code had survived each play scenario during overnight simulations. How would it play for novices? How did it stand up to experts? Crucially, how much money was it likely to rake in for the site operator? And just when everything seemed to be working fine each jurisdiction's gambling authority would demand to paw over the source, looking for potential cheats (we're talking tax evasion here, they weren't always bothered if the punters got scammed! :)

Still, at least I didn't have the tedious job of drawing the graphics!

If you've every drawn a pack of 52 playing cards you'll know what a fiddly cut'n'paste job it can be. Cards with the same symbols don't have the same layout, conversely cards with the same layout don't have the same symbols (duh!) At least the Poker machines had a fixed screen size. Anyone targeting modern PCs and mobile devices needs multiple decks to ensure they always look sharp at any resolution.

It's just an extreme example of a dilemma facing many user interface designers, in a world rapidly fragmenting into living room widescreens, pocket hand-helds, and all shades of resolution in between.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a W3C backed XML format for vector graphics, attracting increasing attention. This is, I'm sure, due in no small part to the emergence of technologies like Flash, Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, with their reliance on vector graphics for scalable crispness, efficient bandwidth, and easy animation capabilities.

SVG is a technology I've been meaning to investigate for some time, and revisiting the playing card problem seems like an ideal test case to learn the ins-and-outs of working with vector images in Java.

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