Community challenge: Automated PBEM e-mailing

[llamabeast]

Zeldor was just commenting to me by PM that it would be really good to have a program to make playing PBEM games easier. A fair few players have commented that they find the faff of PBEM a bit annoying, with a few even refusing to play PBEM games because of it. I have to say I don't find it much of an issue myself - it takes maybe 5 seconds - but depending on e-mail client etc (webmail, eek!) it could be much worse than that.

Now there is a limit to what I can do in this area, not least because I'm currently channelling all my free coding time into LlamaServer improvements (hopefully should have some exciting new features soon). So, I thought I would throw it out to the community and see what ideas people can come up with.

For linux: It seems to me that it should be quite easy to come up with a nice script to automate e-mail sending. I have a perl script which does the actual sending bit, so someone would just need to create a little interface. The first time it's run it should ask for e-mail account details, the location of your dominions folder (or find it itself), and the games you're playing. Then when you run it you would just give it the name of the game whose turn you want to send off and it would do the rest. If a GUI could be added that would be excellent. Er, how do you go about making a GUI in Linux?

For Windows: I know nothing about programming in Windows. But a little program with a GUI and similar operation to the one above would be awesome.

For Mac: I know nothing.

Receiving e-mails: A considerable improvement to the above programs would be if it also was able to check your e-mail, filter for LlamaServer (or other PBEM) e-mails, download attachments from them and put them in the right place. And then if there are any new ones, open Dominions - how cool would that be?

I reckon these would be pretty quick projects for someone who knew what they were doing, and very useful.

Does anyone have any thoughts about the above? Ideas as to better ways of doing it?

[Jazzepi]

The part I waste the most time on with llamaserver games, and BTW I wouldn't play PBEM at all if you hadn't setup the awesomeness that is llamaserver, is the amount of time it takes me to download the attachment to the right folder, open up dominions, and then reattach it when I'm ready to go.

What would give me the most time savings is if there was a single program I could run that would...

1. Download the e-mail, or fetch it from a particular place. The second part is important, I don't want to have to run the program each time just to see if the turn has hosted. Part of the fun of PBEM or Velusion's IP servers is getting the notice in the mail letting you know it has. If the program could both log into a POP account as well as check your regular e-mail client's directory, that would be best.

2. Then open up dom 3 to that game.

3. When I close down dom 3, prompt if you want to send game.

That's pretty much it. That would make me a very happy camper. Llamaserver is great already though, so anything you add is just icing on the cake.

Jazzepi

[llamabeast]

Jazzepi, can you just explain point 1 again for me? I understand (and agree with) the bit that getting an e-mail telling you the new turn is out is fun. But I don't understand the "or fetch it from a particular place. The second part is important." bit.

I like the idea that when you close down dom3 it prompts you to ask whether you want to send the 2h file.

I could almost do this myself (for Linux), if it weren't for my complete ignorance of GUI stuff, and the fact that I'm focussing on the server itself. I expect it would be easy for someone though.

[Jazzepi]

llamabeast said:
Jazzepi, can you just explain point 1 again for me? I understand (and agree with) the bit that getting an e-mail telling you the new turn is out is fun. But I don't understand the "or fetch it from a particular place. The second part is important." bit.

Well, there are two ways to get the file. One is to fetch it through an e-mail client. I use Thunderbird. So, accordingly when I fetch the file it should store it /somewhere/. I'm not sure how, or where, it stores e-mail attachments that have been downloaded from the pop server but not saved explicitly onto the hard drive. My thought was that the program would keep track of which turn attachment to look for, and pick out the newest one by creation date.

This would remove the need to even save the file from the attachment itself.

Actually, I guess you could avoid all of this if the program was able to reach out over the internet and grab its own new copy of the turn file when you ran it and you just used the e-mail alter/turn file as only an alert.

The whole idea was to remove the process of saving the attachment off the e-mail into the individual game folder.

Jazzepi

[Zeldor]

Jazzepi:

I think that Thunderbird has whole inbox, messages and attachments in one big file. It would be quite dangerous for it to just save attachments in any place.

[Jazzepi]

Zeldor said:
Jazzepi:

I think that Thunderbird has whole inbox, messages and attachments in one big file. It would be quite dangerous for it to just save attachments in any place.

I was thinking that's the case =( Which would make trying to understand the file's architecture just to avoid a single step silly.

Would be easier if the program just fetched a new copy of the turn when you ran it, or looked in one place. Also, it would be nice if it gave you a selection to pick from, since I'm in multiple PBEM games.

Jazzepi

[Baalz]

my script is a batch file (for copying files around, launching dom, etc.) and an accompanying sendmail.exe which the bat invookes. How I have it set up is I just make a windows shortcut on my desktop for each game I'm playing and the shortcut is set to invoke the script passing in the args in for that game (game name, nation, etc). Get a turn notification, download the turn to my defauld download dir, click on the shortcut for that game and I'm good to go. I'm writing this from my phone, but when I attatch it tomorrow I'll post no brainer instructions so anybody can use it without needing a command prompt.

[Baalz]

Coincidentally enough I was just putting the finishing touches on my own scripts that work close to what Jazz just outlined. Windows only but Linux should be easy enough. Already planned on releasing it to the community this weekend, just gotta finish testing it tomorrow. FWIW I set up a new gmail account just for this which the turns are sent from so you won't even need to configure any of that for the llamaserver if you're not too technical.

I've been using this script for a couple months and it just occurred to me to make it generic and available for all.

Basically you manually download your tun to the same place every time, launch the script, it launches your Dom game, you take your turn and exit Dom, the script mails your turn to llamaserver (unless you close that window before exitting Dom). No GUI, but easy to use and it works...

[llamabeast]

WOW!!

Now that is a coincidence. Can't wait to give it a try. Good work Baalz!

What did you write it in? I am seriously ignorant of Windows programming, cos I've learnt most of my programming during my PhD, and the department computers use Linux.

[WraithLord]

Well I've made a similar tool for domII (and later adopted it for domIII), but it has fallen into disrepair, mainly because of how neatly llamaserver handles PBEM.

Just to get an idea what the tool is about, Its a python CLI that works for Linux and Windows and requires that the host have a gmail account. I've already used it in the past to host dom-II PBEMs.
The game management options look like:
1. Retreive game turns. [into dominions game folder]
2. Send new turns to players. [Distribute new turns]
3. Broadcast a message. [Send a message to all players in active game]
4. Send status notification. [send a notification of which turns are missing to players]
5. Verify that all turns are valid. [print a list of all missing or invalid turns]
6. Backup current turns. [create a backup of the turn files]
7. Reload turns from archive. [reload specific turn from backup]
8. Host game. [verify that all turns are valid, backup and then host the game]
.

Here is the orginal post (at the bottom of the thread)
I could repair this tool and also add missing features to it and a GUI, actually it would have been nice to do but currently I'm on a tight schedule at work meaning long overtime hours so no time for this. However maybe I could be of some help to this project.