How multiplayer is working out for you guys...

[magnate]

How does the server notify you when the turn has been hosted (using quickhost)? With a PBEM it's there in your email. Assuming you don't want to stay permanently connected to the game server, how do you know? If you wait a couple of days (when you expected the turn to run), you lose all the benefit of quickhost.

Am I missing something?

[Cainehill]

Yep. You connect to the server once or twice a day. It hardly requires you to stay "permanently connected". Takes about what - 15-30 seconds to connect and see the status?

Also, some server games have ways of notifying you. Via email, via a website, or in Esben's case (mosehansen) jabber or whatnot.

[Thufir]

magnate said:
How does the server notify you when the turn has been hosted (using quickhost)? With a PBEM it's there in your email. Assuming you don't want to stay permanently connected to the game server, how do you know? If you wait a couple of days (when you expected the turn to run), you lose all the benefit of quickhost.

Am I missing something?

Indeed, you are

With any server, it's not all that hard to check up occasionally to see if the turn has run (although that does require a Dom2 client). Better yet, with a mosehansen's web front end, it's easy to check the state with any standard browser. Since it tells you the state of all the players, and whether or not they've submitted their turns, you have a pretty good idea of whether you're getting close to the turn hosting (i.e. if only one player is left to submit, then it'll host as soon as that Last player finishes his turn).

Best of all, the ever clever author of the mosehansen server has built in notification via IM w/ Jabber compliant IM clients. I haven't tried this yet, so if anyone out there has, and can say whether this is working well, or not, that'd be helpful. But in advance of such advice, the notification feature sounds pretty nifty and Esben has put a few links to various Jabber IM clients (which I'll be checking out soon ).

[Gandalf Parker]

magnate said:
How does the server notify you when the turn has been hosted (using quickhost)? With a PBEM it's there in your email. Assuming you don't want to stay permanently connected to the game server, how do you know? If you wait a couple of days (when you expected the turn to run), you lose all the benefit of quickhost.

Am I missing something?

There are switches for --preexec and --postexec which will gladly run a routine before or after running the host. In a strictly PbEM game Im guessing it would be used to email the turn files to each player. In a server game it shouldnt be hard to have it email a "HEY! the turn is DONE" message to the list of players (or IM or even a text message to my cell phone). Of course I would also probably use --preexec to make sequential backups of the .2h files before doing a host, and run the game with the --scoredump so that the --postexec can coy the score.html to a webdir for people to check on. Maybe some other neat tricks.

I LOVE that the server will run text-mode on a linux server. It makes doing things like that SOOOooooo easy. Im not sure how you would accomplish any of it on other systems but its there to play with.

[PhilD]

At some point I tried making a script to be used as a --postexec option for turn backup, but getting the turn number (I wanted to keep copies of the game files in Turns/XX/ subdirectories, where XX stands for the turn numbers) was so ugly, I more or less gave up.

But, when one of the players can keep his PC running 24/7, a TCP/IP game with smart enough quickhost options is pretty neat - I convinced a good bunch of other French players of that in a spring game. Just have a look at the options - you can set the server so that it hosts, say, anytime all turns are in, plus whenever 24 hours have passed since the Last hosting, except that Saturdays and Sundays don't count. Or something similar, if it doesn't fit your schedule.

[Gandalf Parker]

PhilD said:
At some point I tried making a script to be used as a --postexec option for turn backup, but getting the turn number (I wanted to keep copies of the game files in Turns/XX/ subdirectories, where XX stands for the turn numbers) was so ugly, I more or less gave up.

I think both --scoredump and --status create a file with the turn number in it. Ive been thinking along the same lines. There are already a couple Versions of programs to do that but they all require that the user have some programming environment loaded to run the scripts. I was going to "basic" it so that I could offer a stand-alone EXE but if you want to C it that would be great.

[PhilD]

Gandalf Parker said:

I think both --scoredump and --status create a file with the turn number in it. Ive been thinking along the same lines. There are already a couple Versions of programs to do that but they all require that the user have some programming environment loaded to run the scripts. I was going to "basic" it so that I could offer a stand-alone EXE but if you want to C it that would be great.

No, it was a bash script - my "solution" wrote a file that contained the turn number, and read from it each time. Like I said, it's ugly - and won't work properly if some turns are run without the script - but that's basically the only way I could think of for adding "permanent memory" to a script.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

Thufir said:
Best of all, the ever clever author of the mosehansen server has built in notification via IM w/ Jabber compliant IM clients. I haven't tried this yet, so if anyone out there has, and can say whether this is working well, or not, that'd be helpful. But in advance of such advice, the notification feature sounds pretty nifty and Esben has put a few links to various Jabber IM clients (which I'll be checking out soon ).

It works indifferently. That is, mostly not :-/ I havn't had the courage to look at it recently, been busy elsewhere.

[Gandalf Parker]

PhilD said:

No, it was a bash script - my "solution" wrote a file that contained the turn number, and read from it each time. Like I said, it's ugly - and won't work properly if some turns are run without the script - but that's basically the only way I could think of for adding "permanent memory" to a script.

Then use --scoredump or --status and grep it.