The new PBW

Urendi Maleldil · #1 June 2nd, 2006, 12:25 AM

I think you should program the new PBW with AJAX and Rounded Corners. I hear both of those programming languages are very popular these days.

Fyron · #2 June 2nd, 2006, 12:35 AM

*assumes Urendi was being sarcastic*

Will · #3 June 2nd, 2006, 01:16 AM

Well, I wouldn't be able to be project lead on the next version of PBW. I could help out a little with design, and more with coding and testing, but I don't have enough background in server technologies to really take on this kind of project as lead. Give me a component of it though, either front end or back end, and I could probably get it working

I'm language-agnostic, so I say use whatever the project lead is most comfortable with.

Aiken · #4 June 2nd, 2006, 06:13 PM

What about SF?
They could offer professional progrmmers to make new pbw server. If we'll ask them of course. I think a hundred of signs will be quite enough. What do you think?

psimancer · #5 June 2nd, 2006, 06:30 PM

dimes to dollars sfi would want to create a pay for play model and a rival pbw server which would be detrimental to the community IMHO it might be feasible when the communiy of pbw players exceeds 100k like the mmorpg ultima online
however the drawbacks to the community are multiple in such a model
and so far we have no track record from sfi to base trust upon regarding such a move

therefore i feel it is a better move to continue our efforts in the community and to provide support for THE pbw server
my only hope would be to be able sometime in the future to be able to setup a backup server operating in sync over the web with the prime so that the prime could go down for a hour or two then come back up resync and be back in business and all be seamless to us the users maybe even separated by a state or 4 thus one net outage wouldn't mean complete server loss (

twould also be nice to have a qoute secondary processor for the server such that it could offload game processing to the secondary processor in a queue thus long processing games could be run by secondary processor and short run games could be processed on the primary server processor but this would take some interesting programming

Fyron · #6 June 2nd, 2006, 08:02 PM

I imagine just spawning a second SE process and leaving it up to the OS's task scheduler would be sufficent.

Will · #7 June 3rd, 2006, 02:41 AM

If SE:V remains about the same popularity as SE:IV, and the load on the PBW server remains the same, I would agree that simply spawning a new process would work. But, we all know that SE:IV -- even after more than 5 years -- is getting more new people coming in. I think it would be safe to say that eventually, PBW will get too big to be handled by a single box in Geo's basement. It really wouldn't be too much programming-wise to add support for multiple machines behind PBW. A really simple way to do it is have one box as the gateway, which has the website and front-end controls, email, etc., and behind that, 1+ machines on a switch connected to the gateway (no connection to the 'net). The gateway computer keeps track of which turns are being processed where, and can farm out turn processing to the other machines by simple socket connections to turn processing controllers on the satellite boxes. When a turn is ready or scheduled to be processed, just pick a machine based on some criteria, send a message with the location of the turn files (probably best to keep everything on one big central RAID'ed drive), the satellite machine processes, and sends a message back when it's done so the gateway can send out the emails and update the website.

While it likely will not be immediately necessary, it would still be a good idea to design the capability in from the start. That way, when it is needed, it's just a matter of getting a donation drive started for equipment, and configuring the machines to network.