Minesweeper Flags API !

Good news for all you other developers out there, and for all Minesweeper Flags players.

With the new Minesweeper Flags server (which has actually been rewritten one more time since my last post), it is now written in Java. And with Java comes the possibility of external class loading and reloading! What this basically means is that, given some .jar files which we can call “plugins”, many features of the server is now possible to add, change and remove by using plugins.

For using this plugin system, I have developed a Minesweeper API which is available to use for everybody that wants to help develop Minesweeper Flags. To make sure that all plugins live up to the standard (not doing anything it shouldn’t with the server), all homemade plugins has to be sent and approved by me.

The Minesweeper Flags possibilities suddenly became sooooo much bigger!

The API jar can be downloaded here: http://mfe.zomis.net/api/MfeAPI.jar

The javadoc for the API can be seen here: http://mfe.zomis.net/javadoc

A good base-plugin Eclipse project can be downloaded from http://mfe.zomis.net/api/exampleplugin.zip

I would love feedback about this new system! And looking forward to plugin contributions.

Also you can make a good old contribution in the form of a donation, which would be greatly appreciated.

What’s going on?

If you’re wondering what’s happening around here, I can tell you that it’s mainly about three things right now:

  • New WordPress theme

I’ve learned a lot about WordPress and about developing themes and plugins for WordPress lately, so I’m planning on changing the theme on my main page, http://www.zomis.net, to my own theme, which in my eyes looks a lot better than this (then again, I’m no design expert…)

The Minesweeper Flags Extreme server is basically a script written in PHP. Currently it’s a lot of ugly code that’s hard to build any new features into. I’ve come a long way with rewriting this already but there’s still work to be done. As a player, you won’t be able to tell much difference but the difference is very important for me as a programmer.

  • Translating 6000 lines of code from C# to Java

I’ve received permission by a guy named Mario to use his code of a good Minesweeper Flags AI. The code is written in C# but I need to translate it to Java. Now, there’s quite a difference between Java and C# apparently – mainly the use of a “Nullable” class and operator overloading (which both exists in C# but not in Java) – so this will basically take some time :)

Besides these three things, there’s a lot of other stuff on my mind as well. I don’t make much money from the three things above though, if I would have done that then I could spend a lot more time doing what I really like to do.

Best greetings and have a nice day!