New & raw web based Dominion II game server

[Reverend Zombie]

Re: passwords and stealing

I don't think the password prevents access until the game has started. During the nation-selection phase, it seems anyone can go in and "overwrite" another players selection of nation with their own pretender?

I am in the Urgaia game as Arco, would appreciate if no one "steals" that!

On another note, the Urgaia game seems perpetually stuck at around 83000 seconds for the countdown--when is it really going to start?

[ February 20, 2004, 11:06: Message edited by: Reverend Zombie ]

[PhilD]

Originally posted by Reverend Zombie:
Re: passwords and stealing

I don't think the password prevents access until the game has started. During the nation-selection phase, it seems anyone can go in and "overwrite" another players selection of nation with their own pretender?

AFAIK, there is no way to "protect" a nation until the game is started. It would be a nice added feature if "open" network games are to become more standard.

One solution, I believe, would be to have the game start offline, as a PBEM game, then go TCP/IP. Not counting the upload question, do the command line switch allow this?

[Esben Mose Hansen]

The HD ran full today. I did manage to save the quickSundering game, though, so I suppose all's well that ends well.

As you can probably see on the webpage, the participants/waiting for aren't exactly working yet. I will address this another day -- I need to take a day off from this, to regain my energy.

And yes, the WarsOfGaia demostrates (another) error in the game server: uploadtime doesn't work. It does count down, but not as fast as it should. My current theory is that it only counts down when somebody is actually Online.

Too bad about being able to steal each other gods. I would call that a bug in the game. Short of supporting PBM, I do not see what I can do about this.

I'll try to find a place to report bugs to Illwinter.And maybe I'll look into converting the server to PBM --- the TCP/IP server has a lot more bugs than I counted on Or maybe I'm just tired.

[PhilD]

Originally posted by Esben Mose Hansen:

Too bad about being able to steal each other gods. I would call that a bug in the game. Short of supporting PBM, I do not see what I can do about this.

At the least, it's a strange feature that there is no control of who can start the game or connect or whatever... I suppose the design was initially done with LAN games in mind.

I'll try to find a place to report bugs to Illwinter.And maybe I'll look into converting the server to PBM --- the TCP/IP server has a lot more bugs than I counted on Or maybe I'm just tired.

support@illwinter.com is at least OK to report bugs to.

As for the TCP/IP vs PBEM: I really like the TCP/IP option, but it might be much simpler to have a simple upload/download of turn files, with the hosting called when all turn files are in. Also, much lighter on the resources: you wouldn't have to keep a server running for each game. But the advantage of the Dom server is that it takes care of the password thing - only, it doesn't care until the game is actually started.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

The server is up again. I had forgotten had a query logger running. As I'm using mysql extensively, this log mananged to hog 75% of my HD on the server.

It should be fixed now. I've already restart quickSundering. Wars of Gaia seem against all probability to have survived a full HD, and restarting the mysql database server. Sometimes, Perl is quite cool. Also I'm impressed with the Gentoo folks: A full root partition is usually bad news for any Linux. It didn't even complain (much).

As for a PBM versus TCP/IP, here is my take on it:

Advantages of TCP/IP:
-----------------------------
We've tried to do this. It sort of work.
It's convenient
Fast games are easy/possible.
Doesn't require a mailbox.

Advantages of PBM
------------------------------
Uses few system resources
Easy to work around bugs
Easy to backup/make stable
Easier to make up for Dominion shortcomings.
Doesn't require a fixed IP address.

But that's just my take on it. If dominions had no bugs, I'd say convenience overrule everything else. Now I don't know.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

Forgot to say: I just happened upon the reason for the bug with "Waiting for" (I was assuming that all games were shortened to three chars). It's fixed, so now you can just surf to my servers main page to see if it's your time to move.

The Participants seems quite broken though. It may just be because QuickSundering has been started before I implemented this.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

Well, upload time is completely shot. At random intervals, the counter will start all over. I just watched it happen in the WarsOfGaia game.I think I will just kill that game sometime next week, and remove the upload time field from the webpage sometime.

An interesting observation is that the CPU requirement a game is actually quite low; except for the startup phase. So I think my little server could actually host quite a number of games, provided that only a few are in the upstart mode.

Anyway: interest in the server continues to be low. Anybody know why? Is such a server just not in demand; is it too buggy, does it miss a key feature...? At the current usage level, I cannot bring myself to use much time on it. I will let it run for a least a month, though, and see what happens. I will also watch this thread.

It was a fun little project in any case