PBW now supporting SE5.

[geoschmo]

Yeah, that would work Will if I understand what you mean. It would be kind of a pain in the butt for the PBW admins currently as we would in effect be setting up a separate mod for every game. Even in cases where they are using the same mod.

It's kind of along the lines of an idea I have had for a future version of PBW which would allow the game owner to setup their own mods. You'd basically upload a zip file to the game page and PBW would extract this each time the turn was processed. Then changing the mod would be as easy as the game owner uploading a different zip file. We currently don't have it coded to work that way though.

Geoschmo

[Will]

Not quite, Geo... Instead of making a new mod folder for every game, you would make a new mod SHORTCUT for every game. So if there are five games on PBW using Mod_XYZ, you would have one Mod_XYZ folder, and five shortcuts to the Mod_XYZ folder, each shortcut named after the game. So, upon game creation, all that is needed is a script that will generate a shortcut for the game. As long as SEV is set up to resolve shortcuts when used as a folder... which I don't know if it can.

If not, then Kwok's method would probably be the best way, barring Aaron making changes to how mods are kept in savegames and loaded.

[geoschmo]

Will said:
As long as SEV is set up to resolve shortcuts when used as a folder... which I don't know if it can.

Oh, I see. It should be easy enough to test whether SE5 will handle a shortcut instead of a folder. You can put a shortcut in your SE5 folder and see if SE5 recognizes it as a mod when you create a new game.

Even if it works for SE5, it doesn't eliminate the main stumbling block to your idea from a PBW perspective. I'd still have to manually setup a mod version for every game. It would save me from having to have actual separate copies of the mod for each game, but that's only a matter of disk space which is really a minor concern. You can always throw another hard drive or two in the server.

However, if I could recode PBW to do what you are suggesting that could work pretty well I think. But that's, as they say, the rub.

[Phoenix-D]

Geo, you shouldn't have to define a mod version for each game. Say someone wanted to use the Balance Mod. Fine, stick it in the Gametypes folder.

Once the first turn is made and uploaded, PBW will do the rest automatically; every time the savegame is loaded, it checks to see if the mod folder is there, and if it is, it uses it.

The only wrinkle is the mod folder name must be exactly the same on PBW and on the host's computer, but that's not a big deal..

Someone else wants to use the Balance Mod? No problem, its already set up. The only problem is mod updates.

[geoschmo]

As a test of this I went ahead and added the Balance Mod version .99 to the server gametypes folder. I guess that's all that has to happen. I've never tested whether or not running it from the command line actually pulls from the correct mod folder however. Have anyone verified this running from the command line? If you want to let PBW try and process yours turns that would be cool. I am assuming you would have some way of knowing whether it actually used the mod and not the stock files?

It does look a little confusing as there is still only one version of SE5 showing on PBW even though it's setup for the mod to work. What I will do tonight is add a version ID for the Balance mod, but it will point to the same .exe the stock files pull from. Then if it's working right the savegame file should know where to get the datafiles from.

Then the only issue becomes one of updating when Kwok updates the mod. I'm assuming that if I update the mod on the server and you don't update your pc you will get some sort of version mispatch error when you try to open the next turn. Is that correct?

Geoschmo

[Phoenix-D]

Haven't tested it, so I'm not sure. I'll stick my game into auto-run and see what happens..

[geoschmo]

Well it appears that the PBW server auto-processed at least one turn, and I didn't hear any earth shattering boom form the general direction of my garage so that much is ok.

Actually I had tested that much myself and was confident the turns would process fine. I'm curious though whether it seemed to use the mod data files correctly.

I'm also curious to see how long it's going to take to processes games once the empires get large and complicated. In SE4 it's not uncommon for epic games to hit the 20 minute timeout after 100 turns or so. Hopefully SE5 won't end up being more resource intensive and seeing games time out sooner. We'll see what happens in that case.

Geoschmo