Technical text for three player chess- Adrian Eaton

Adrian sent through this text- we are still considering the security issues of making the source code of the game available to other developers.
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The game has been developed in flash and is designed for multiple players on the Internet. An XML Socket Server which was written in Java was also developed to handle the communication at the server end. On the Flash Actionscript side I used object orientated techniques for ease of programming as with the java implementations.

For speed valid moves are calculated on the client side. The other option would have been to validate everything on the server, which could make the game look jumpy for users with low bandwidth. (not that the game is bandwidth hungry).

My decision to use java on the server side, was due to platform independence, as I did not know at in the initial stages what operating system would be used on the server. Also the socket implementations in the java libraries made it incredibly easy to handle the laborious task of communications.

Unfortunately clients that are behind a firewall or proxy that block the socket used by the game will not be able to connect to the server. There are ways around this however it would be far too costly to achieve with the available budget for this project.

Overall this has been an interesting project to work on, and I am glad that the finished product does not only work but seems to be very stable. I look forward to people playing the game.

-Adrian Eaton