Any spectate or replay function for Dom3 games?

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by Alneyan

I can see a pretty straightforward way of allowing spectators in a TCP/IP game, though: just run two instances of the game, one for the actual players, and the other one for the spectators. When a turn runs, have the first game copy its files to the second one.

Does that sound like what you were looking for? I know the game doesn't have those two features in a convenient form, but I think it's possible to get a pretty close approximation with a limited amount of hackery. The hackery itself is easy enough to do, but I'm just not sure if it's going to be good enough for what you have in mind. Let me know

EXCELLENT. Yes that would be really easy to setup. Having the post-exec command do the copying.

And Yes lch, there would be some drawbacks. The first one I thought of was that an unscrupulous player could view the files of his enemies. The best option for a lurker is to ask one player if they can get copies of the turn files. I think that for the next mid-to-large game I host I will make the option for emailing turns to multiple addresses.

But what I had in mind was an exhibition game. I think that the IRC crowd could put together a game where the abuses would be few, and allow all of the eager learners lurking here to peek into their actions. It wouldnt be a serious game since there would be too many factors. Such as, there would be too much temptation to discuss everything that we see even while the strategy is in play and possibly give it away to the enemy.

[lch]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

But what I had in mind was an exhibition game. I think that the IRC crowd could put together a game where the abuses would be few, and allow all of the eager learners lurking here to peek into their actions.

As I said, for blitzes it has become quite popular to spectate at others, and the players are usually okay with it as they play without any pretender passwords set anyway. The users namad and especially moderation quite often take a look over another one's shoulder.

I prepared a shell script a while ago which repackages my backups of games played on my server into that form where they are being renamed into folders carrying the turn number, and so on. So if the players are okay with it, I could prepare finished games for spectators. Here it is:

#!/bin/bash

for file in *-pre.tgz
do
  game=`echo $file | sed "s/-[0-9]*-pre.tgz$//g"`
  tar xzf $file
  title=`grep -oEm 1 "Dominions 3 Scores, [^<]*" $game/scores.html | sed "s/Dominions 3 Scores, //g"`
  if [ -z "$title" ]
  then
    title="$game turn 1"
  fi
  mv "$game" "$title"
done

It needs all the backups for that game in the current directory and the games to be hosted with the --scoredump switch. Here's how I create my backups, to be run in the "savedgames" folder:

tar czf "/home/dom3/dominions3/backups/"$GAME-$(date +%s)-pre.tgz $GAME

Using the backups from the --preexec commands has the added bonus that you can see the orders that the players gave, all the army movement arrows and so on. I could probably come up with a couple of more games to peek into by asking a crowd of players that frequently play on my server, if there's interest in that.