Introduction

This is a web application of the classic board game Risk that is run straight in your browser. This is currently a work in progress. This game is built using modern web technologies and frameworks.

Technologies used:

• Babel (For transpiling ES2015)
• Grunt (Build tool used for building and running tests and other things)
• Jest (For unit tests)
• Angular 1.x (MVW framework)
• less (CSS preprocessor)
• Bootstrap (HTML & CSS framework)
• Electron (Used for creating exe-installer dists of the game so that it can be intalled and ran as a desktop application)
• Node.js For running the server logic that is used for online gameplay
• Express.js Backend server framework
• Socket.IO Websocket client for updating clients with new data from the server
• Heroku For dedicated remote server
• Firebase Database and authentication handling and storing of user data (such as statistics and user settings)

Prerequisites

First make sure to have Nodejs installed. This project is designed to work with the latest version of Nodejs (14.15.3) and npm. Download it here

Next up install the following packages globally that will be needed for the build process:

npm install -g grunt
npm install -g grunt-cli

Getting started

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/ToWelie89/TotalRisk.git

Install all dependencies by running

npm install

(To build and run the project locally you need both dependencies and devDependencies)

grunt default

DO NOTE! You can now run the game on your local machine, however the server that is used primarily for online play still runs on a remote server. If you want the game to use the local server you need to build the assets using the following command instead:

grunt default:local

This will change the endpoints to your local machine instead. This is useful if you are developing changes on the server logic and need to test it out locally, or if the remote prod server is for some reason down.

How to run locally (Web version)

• Start server

npm start

Open http://127.0.0.1:5000 in your browser. Running the game in your browser is good enough for testing out the game locally and for development purposes, but the actual finished game is supposed to be a standalone application that can be run in full screen. To try this out, continue reading the section below.

How to run locally (Electron version)

To run as a standlone desktop application simply execute:

npm run electron

This will run the game as a standalone electron Windows application. However this will run as a production mode, it will attempt to check for previous releases of the game and patch the game with the latest version if one is found. This is done using electron-updater. But right now the game is in development and the game may get stuck in a loading screen unless you run in a specific dev mode. To do this run:

npm run electron:dev

In dev mode you can also refresh the app by pressing F5, so that you don't have to restart the game when you make changes.

How to test locally

• Run

npm test

This will run a bunch of Jest unit tests.

Building Electron app

Simply run

npm run build-app

This may take a little while. When done the newly built setup exe-file can be found in the dist-folder.

Publishing new release

This requires that you have an authorized Github-token as an environment variable on your machine, which at the moment only I do 😉

Simply run:

npm run publish

The newly published release should then be found here. Click on "Edit" for your new release and then choose "Publish release".

Bumping version

To automatically bump the version and creating a tag in Git the Grunt-plugin "Grunt-bump" is used. Use it after creating a new commit. Here's an example:

git add --all
git commit -m "some new changes"
grunt bump:[major/minor/patch]

This will automatically push your commit to the repo, bump the version in package.json and creating a tag.

Get code stats

To see how many lines of code the project consists of simply run:

npm run lines

This requires the package known as "cloc". You can install it globally by running:

npm install -g cloc

Troubleshooting

Unresolved dependencies (bufferutil, util8) when trying to build electron app

The quickest fix is to add the following as an environment variable:

export ELECTRON_BUILDER_ALLOW_UNRESOLVED_DEPENDENCIES=true

Failed to load gRPC binary module error

Update This should be fixed now since I updated the Firebase version

If you get an error message sort of like this it might have something to do with a known issue between Firebase and Electron. I managed to fix this by running (in a console with admin rights):

npm --add-python-to-path='true' --debug install --global windows-build-tools

This will install a bunch of useful dev tools for Windows and add them to your PATH. In this case we need Python so that we then can run:

npm rebuild --runtime=electron --target=3.0.2 --disturl=https://atom.io/download/electron

cross-env problem

If when you try to run as an Electron app you may get an error that refers to cross-env. In that case try installing it globally:

npm install -g cross-env

Other

For other issues please leave a bug report here or contact me directly via mail: sonesson8909@hotmail.com

Default Grunt build job explained

• clean:build: Deletes all previous compiled build files
• browserify:build: Browserify will build the entry point js-file app.js with the transform babelify and preset es2015 to transpile ES2015 code
• less: Compile less into a css-file