New & raw web based Dominion II game server

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Esben Mose Hansen:
Username and error message, please?

The username is Gdice.
The error message is:
"Login failed. Please retry or contact site administrator to get password reset."

[Esben Mose Hansen]

1. I've uploaded a new Version. It's mostly adminstrative changes, but I did include the option to "deconfess" to playing a nation. Note that the administrative bit was introduction of player group accesses, so it's quite possible it will go horrible wrong.

2. I can't find any user name gdice on the system Could you please just re-register that login?

3. Stale-player detection is definitely on my todo list. It just needs a bit of infrastructure, of which the Confess bit represent the first bit.

4. How would you all feel if players could see one anothers details, like jabber id, email address, experience and so on? Only logged in players could do this, of course.

5. It would definitely be a bug if moving for one nation remove all nations in a game from the welcome points-of-interest table. If anyone sees this again, could you double-check by "view/manage" the game and checking the dreaded yes/no table for game nations? Check for inconsistencies with the point-of-interest table. Thanks.

P.S: About TentoTangedeux, this is the stats.txt file from Last turn:

Abysia played this turn
Pythium didn't play this turn
Man played this turn
Ulm played this turn
C'tis didn't play this turn
Arcoscephale played this turn
Ermor didn't play this turn
Pangaea played this turn
R'lyeh played this turn
T'ien Ch'i played this turn

So you have at worst three stale players. You could send them an ingame message and ask them to identify themselves or be killed.

[ April 20, 2004, 20:45: Message edited by: Esben Mose Hansen ]

[sergex]

Ooo, I just thought of a useful feature! Can you add a field so we can put links of the threads in this forum for the games we start? I'm not sure if you can put in HTML comments in the comments field.

Great job, man!

[ April 21, 2004, 02:35: Message edited by: sergex ]

[Daynarr]

Originally posted by Esben Mose Hansen:
4. How would you all feel if players could see one anothers details, like jabber id, email address, experience and so on? Only logged in players could do this, of course.

You could allow players that are in the same game to see each others e-mail, as well. Of course, there should be an account option to ask players if they want to reveal such information (disabled by default).

[Yossar]

Originally posted by Esben Mose Hansen:
P.S: About TentoTangedeux, this is the stats.txt file from Last turn:

Abysia played this turn
Pythium didn't play this turn
Man played this turn
Ulm played this turn
C'tis didn't play this turn
Arcoscephale played this turn
Ermor didn't play this turn
Pangaea played this turn
R'lyeh played this turn
T'ien Ch'i played this turn

So you have at worst three stale players. You could send them an ingame message and ask them to identify themselves or be killed.

I know Ermor hasn't taken a turn in a long time. My armies have been walking around in his territory with no resistance for a while.

Pretty sure Pythium is out too. Inexplicably, nobody has attacked them, but army size, research, provinces, and income have all been flat for about 6 turns.

Not sure about C'tis. They're one of the strongest nations in the game so I'd be surprised, but you never know.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by Esben Mose Hansen:
1. I've uploaded a new Version. It's mostly adminstrative changes, but I did include the option to "deconfess" to playing a nation. Note that the administrative bit was introduction of player group accesses, so it's quite possible it will go horrible wrong.

Let me know when you get around to packaging the web interface.

4. How would you all feel if players could see one anothers details, like jabber id, email address, experience and so on? Only logged in players could do this, of course.

From experience I would make it a game option, or leave it off. Known players is something we have from creating games here in the forum. Its been a common request to have some easy way to do anonymous games. Some players feel too restricted by playing within their personal reputations. For instance, "Gandalf Parker" is much more likely to never break an alliance agreement than "PsudoNym" is.

So you have at worst three stale players. You could send them an ingame message and ask them to identify themselves or be killed.

In my notes about making a web game server (until you shot way ahead of me) I was considering creating a subdirectory for each game and making it an option to have stats and score file put there. Possibly other game info such as a way for players to converse and still maintain their login aliases.

[Norfleet]

Here's a big suggestion that could potentially take some work to implement, but be very awesome:

1. Don't use the Dominions II pretender upload interface: It's too prone to undesirable behaviors like accidental starting or overwriting. Instead, make people upload and delete their pretenders for the game through their web interface: That way, nobody can overwrite somebody else's slot, start the game prematurely, etc.

2. Implement AWOL tracking: A player has obviously staled when, at the time of a turn generation, his .trn file exists and is more recent than his .2h: If this occurs for several turns in a row, perhaps a number of turns determined at game setup, the player can be deemed to be AWOL. Since he had to submit his pretender through the web interface, the server now knows who he is: Display his AWOLness on the game status screen, and mark it on his permanent record.

3. Allow a player to hand his slot over to another player. Allow a player deemed to be AWOL to have his slot taken over by another player, if he did not password and can be subbed.

4. Configure the game setup such that the creator of a game can disallow a player who has more than X games AWOL to join: Thus, if BillyBob has gone AWOL in 3 games, and I wish to start a zero-tolerance game, such that no player who has ever gone AWOL may join, this player may not join the game. The caveat being that an unruly game-wrecker may attempt to create a second account to get around this. Also allow it such that games can be restricted to allow only those whose accounts were created BEFORE the game was created, or some other fixed date/offset. As a stopgap measure to reduce this occurrence, disallow anyone whose IP/email matches that of a player who has been recorded as going AWOL from creating another account. This won't catch them all, but it'll certainly make this harder, and be fairly trivial to implement.