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Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker
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No, as far as I'm aware that's an interface to create and start a new game, but nothing after that. I had something in mind which smoothes the whole process that currently has to be handled manually by game admins in regards to organizing and administrating a game. Something where game admins can create/register a game, invite other people by formmail and use possibly some kind of token to the game or have it displayed on a overview page and leave the slots open for (registered) users to fill them. Verification of email addresses so people receive email notification on hosting for the games they're in, which they could optionally turn off, too. Then an option to boot people from said slots, handle players who work as substitutes, reset/change the clock for the game, and so on. All the little manual things. For games hosted on the server itself, access to the game backups, ability to revert to turn no. X, optionally extensive graphs for the game and a map of who owns which provinces currently. Blahblahblah, as I said, implementing the user management and web interface to handle all this would take quite some time and while something like that would certainly be "nice to have" and I even had some of the technical stuff implemented, I thought that it wouldn't be worth the effort. Especially not in the long run.
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Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker
As far as the need, de-facto, and no problems with pbem I would disagree. It is very common on this forum to put larger games on LLama's server (and I greatly appreciate it for that) but its not "the de-facto standard for playing Dom3 games". Possibly it is on Sombre's. On the other forums very little is pbem, nor does there seem much interest in it altho I make sure they all know that LLama's is available.
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I've considered PBEM to be quite cumbersome, myself, but after the Llamaserver was fully operational people have voiced more than once that they prefer it to networked games. One of their points was that you have less issues with firewalls, the other that they automatically have access to their previous turns in their mailbox, which for networked games would require them to take care of backups themselves. I'd say that's about as much work as saving and getting the turn files from your mailbox every turn to play PBEM, but I can accept the points they make.
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Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker
But if someone wanted to create a server like Matryx's (they would have to do it from scratch I guess) then it might spread things out abit. That server arrangment is entirely setup for hosted direct-connect games.
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As you said yourself, it isn't really a server (as in, something that hosts games), but a service which tracks games on other servers. A web interface or web version to the game monitor tools that have become available here from multiple people, too. I don't know if you noticed that I had something like that when I've had my stuff hosted by you, too, I've even shared/compared code with Matryx. The problem is that the socket support in PHP4/5 is abysmal and you can't be fully sure that you receive something back when you make a request to a remote game server, it could just hang for an indefinite time. AFAIK what Matryx does to overcome this is to poll every server in set intervals, every couple of minutes or so, instead of when a request is made.