Language teacher needs card game hud and/or script help

[Barbara Novelli]

Hi,

I don't have the time or knowledge to re-invent the wheel in terms of card game huds.  I'm a language teacher in SL, and I have combed the SL marketplace for a cardgame hud I can modify for language teaching purposes.  The are plenty of basic card game huds out there, but they are not modifiable or transferrable.  What to do?  What to do? 

I don't need a sophisticated hud.  I intend to simply replace regular card faces with words and/or pictures, then have the students draw 5 cards from a deck on a table in a way that permits only the person drawing the cards to see the cards.  When the drawer has a pair or trio, etc., I want him or her to be able to lay the cards on the table for everyone to see and discuss. 

Since I or some other teacher will always be present when the students are playing the games, the scripts and/or hud does not have to be very smart.   For example, the scripts or hud do not need to know the rules of the card game being played since getting the students to listen to and ask questions about the rules is one of the primary purposes of the activity.

I suppose I could just put 52 textures or notecards into a deck-type object with a giver script in it so that when the deck is touched, it gives out single textures in a random order until the deck is depleted. 

Notecards would work because they will only rez on their owner's screen when received.  But I can't put pictutes into notecards.  For pictures, I need to be able to give out textures, but textures pose a problem since they don't automatically open when received.  Because of these problems, a hud that can hold each player's cards would be helpful.

I supposed when it is time to "lay down" a hand, the students could just drop the notecards/textures into 5 notecard displaying objects.

Any wizards out there that can help me refine these ideas?

Thanks for any thoughts you might share,

Barbara Novelli

[Veritas Kennedy]

Would each player need to have their own place on the table to lay down cards?

 

The hud, would it have the players highlight a card, then select "place cards on table" ? (Maximum of 5 cards)

 

On a players turn is it garunteed that a player nedds to play cards, or could it pass?

 

(IE On the player hud would the three options be Drawto 5 , Play Highlighted Cards, Pass)

[Rolig Loon]

It shouldn't be terribly hard to do what you want. You never have to send an actual texture, just its UUID.  First, store your 52 texture UUIDs in the dealer script. Then have it simply send one UUID at random to anyone who touches it.  The toucher's HUD then receives the UUID and displays the texture on one of five display faces on his/her screen.  When the user sees that s/he has cards to share with other players, s/he touches the appropriate display face and the script sends the UUID of the texture on that face to a public display board that receives and displays the textures again, the same way that the HUD did.  So ... three scripts:  a "dealer", a HUD, and a public display, and the last two are basically versions of the same script.

[Barbara Novelli]

It probably would be best if each player had their own place on the table to lay down cards for rummy-type games.   Then if another player had an adverb or logical prepositional phrase, adjective, etc., to add to the sentence that was laid down, the original play and the additions could easily be seen.

Of course, for other card games it might only be necessary to have one central place to lay down cards.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a linguistic card game I would create that would allow players to only pass. But a game hud with the choices Draw to, Play Highlighted Cards, and Pass would cover all the options I might want, as long as I made it clear to the students when I explained the games that merely passing would not be acceptable.

Great questions!  I've done some building and scripting in SL, but it is clearly not my forte.

 

 

[Barbara Novelli]

Hmmm, okay, I hadn't thought about using the UUIDs. In fact, I just recently became aware of what they are.

Would the deck stop dealing when one copy of each UUID had been distributed, or would it continue drawing from the same pool of UUIDs infinitely?  I would want it to stop after one and only one of each card had been dealt.

Unfortunately, I am as dumb as I look and would have to find or buy a dealer script somewhere.  Are they for sale in the SL marketplace?

[Rolig Loon]

Details like that are usually easy to design into a script once you get the general idea in hand.  My basic point was that it's easier to pass around UUIDs than the pass around textures themselves.  You just list all the UUIDs in your script (or read them in on a notcard) and never have to store them in object contents.  The HUD script only has to focus on three tasks: (1) putting an incoming texture on an unused prim face, (2) passing that texture along to the display unit when the HUD's owner touches it, and (3) cleaning up.