"Internet Sppoker" Online card game

[FleetAdmiralBacon]

SPPoker is a card game played with special playing cards that also have letters on them. It's a sort of combination of scrabble and poker. It was invented by my old Algebra II teacher's father his friends family (more so the latter). They own all of the rights to the game, so I can't release this until I get word back from them. The game itself consists of each player being dealt seven cards and then deciding whether to a play a word (longer is better, as is further back in the dictionary) or a 5-card poker hand (with 4 wild cards, so a "5-of-a-kind" is possible, 5 aces being the best hand), or, at the risk of losing 2 points, both (at which point, you either win both or none).

Anywho, when I first heard about the game, I absolutely had to make a computer version of it (maybe I'm addicted to programming?). 2000+ lines of Python, ~30 minutes in Inkscape, hours upon hours of beta testing, and I think I have a pretty good product.

Tiny thumbnails: (obviously, click for bigger)


YouTube video: pgDybjeszBQ

More information:
- Written in Python, using PyGame (SDL bindings) and PyEnchant (Aspell/Hunspell/Myspell bindings for spell checking).
- Networking stack uses a SocketServer to serve UDP requests, clients use an asyncore.dispatcher to handle incoming requests.
- Lots of threading, which was also the cause for most of the bugs I had to fix.
- Game will search for local network games and retrieve a list from my website of potential games.
- AI still needs a bit of tweaking, but works rather nicely. They always use the best word or hand available to them, but that doesn't make them perfect (I tend to win for the most part by playing horrible poker hands due to the current set up)
- Compatibility fixes are present for Windows and Linux involving some strange issues with event buffers in PyGame (Windows needs them, X11 does not).
- In game, there is a simple chat system as well as a debug console with a few commands (before I fixed a bunch of bugs, I used it to kickstart the server when one of its control threads crashed)
- Networking is, again, UDP, running on port 2009. In a local game, the client will start a server and a prompt for the number of AI you want to add.

I'm still awaiting word from the inventors (and I'm not about ready to break copyright and trademark law here), so no release just yet. The plan is to, if acceptable, release it under GPLv3 and distribute Python sources as well as Py2EXE and cxfreeze binaries. If requested, I may not release the source. Or, there's always the possibility that they reject it, but hey, the game isn't very popular and this may give them some extra attention. We'll see. In the meantime, enjoy the video.

[Geo]

Looks good, hopefully you can release.

[[cc]z@nd!]

looks interesting. I'm no python jockey, but it would be neat to see the source of this one. I hope they let you release the source.