Play by Web is now open

[Admiral]

Your imagination is getting carried away. This is a highly multithreaded, multiprocess server. Hence, several instances of the same SE4 can be running at once. Therefore, to do it in the simple fashion you suggest would lead to problems. The solution, then, is to synchronize access to any particular instance of SE4, which of course will mean that fewer turns can be running simultaneously. Not a big problem now, but if the system gets thousands of Users and hundreds of games, it may become a problem. It would be possible to pool instances, but at 150 megs per install, it would get big fast, but would allow more instances to run simultaneously. If the ModPath could be specified on the command line, the simple Version would work.

Admiral

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Space Empires IV Play by Web

[Suicide Junkie]

Wow.

I had no idea it was that large.

I guess you could just support the top few mods, or allow other people to host a PBW game on their own 24h servers...

[geoschmo]

quote:

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or allow other people to host a PBW game on their own 24h servers...

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SJ, You can do that now by hosting a game on your own PC and having the players email you the files. That's the sort of thing that Fuerte's PBEM helper is ideal for, although you can even do it the hard way. Lot's of people have.

But I've done it myself and PBW is a LOT easier.

Geo

[Admiral]

I do intend to fully support mods (including user submitted ones!), but it is more work than setting the path.txt file. I make a living building large, scalable systems and this is not as big as those by far, but it is designed with a similar level of scalability and modularity.

(Actually, it was interesting trying to figure out how to do things with only open source products like Tomcat and MySQL rather than Weblogic and Oracle.)

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Space Empires IV Play by Web

[This message has been edited by Admiral (edited 29 May 2001).]

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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SJ, You can do that now by hosting a game on your own PC and having the players email you the files. That's the sort of thing that Fuerte's PBEM helper is ideal for, although you can even do it the hard way. Lot's of people have.

But I've done it myself and PBW is a LOT easier.

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If you could create your own PBW server, then you could install most Versions and any mod of SE4 you wanted on your machine, and your PBW would run that mod without problems.
The PBW program would then not have to deal with multiple mods, just the one that is installed on your server...

Still, if the central PBW server could handle mods (and updates? ) that would be best.

BTW, how hard would it be to support the update of mods to a newer, compatible-with-savegames Version?

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 30 May 2001).]