[lch]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

But what I had in mind was an exhibition game. I think that the IRC crowd could put together a game where the abuses would be few, and allow all of the eager learners lurking here to peek into their actions.

As I said, for blitzes it has become quite popular to spectate at others, and the players are usually okay with it as they play without any pretender passwords set anyway. The users namad and especially moderation quite often take a look over another one's shoulder.

I prepared a shell script a while ago which repackages my backups of games played on my server into that form where they are being renamed into folders carrying the turn number, and so on. So if the players are okay with it, I could prepare finished games for spectators. Here it is:

#!/bin/bash

for file in *-pre.tgz
do
  game=`echo $file | sed "s/-[0-9]*-pre.tgz$//g"`
  tar xzf $file
  title=`grep -oEm 1 "Dominions 3 Scores, [^<]*" $game/scores.html | sed "s/Dominions 3 Scores, //g"`
  if [ -z "$title" ]
  then
    title="$game turn 1"
  fi
  mv "$game" "$title"
done

It needs all the backups for that game in the current directory and the games to be hosted with the --scoredump switch. Here's how I create my backups, to be run in the "savedgames" folder:

tar czf "/home/dom3/dominions3/backups/"$GAME-$(date +%s)-pre.tgz $GAME

Using the backups from the --preexec commands has the added bonus that you can see the orders that the players gave, all the army movement arrows and so on. I could probably come up with a couple of more games to peek into by asking a crowd of players that frequently play on my server, if there's interest in that.