How multiplayer is working out for you guys...

[magnate]

How does the server notify you when the turn has been hosted (using quickhost)? With a PBEM it's there in your email. Assuming you don't want to stay permanently connected to the game server, how do you know? If you wait a couple of days (when you expected the turn to run), you lose all the benefit of quickhost.

Am I missing something?

[Cainehill]

Yep. You connect to the server once or twice a day. It hardly requires you to stay "permanently connected". Takes about what - 15-30 seconds to connect and see the status?

Also, some server games have ways of notifying you. Via email, via a website, or in Esben's case (mosehansen) jabber or whatnot.

[Thufir]

magnate said:
How does the server notify you when the turn has been hosted (using quickhost)? With a PBEM it's there in your email. Assuming you don't want to stay permanently connected to the game server, how do you know? If you wait a couple of days (when you expected the turn to run), you lose all the benefit of quickhost.

Am I missing something?

Indeed, you are

With any server, it's not all that hard to check up occasionally to see if the turn has run (although that does require a Dom2 client). Better yet, with a mosehansen's web front end, it's easy to check the state with any standard browser. Since it tells you the state of all the players, and whether or not they've submitted their turns, you have a pretty good idea of whether you're getting close to the turn hosting (i.e. if only one player is left to submit, then it'll host as soon as that Last player finishes his turn).

Best of all, the ever clever author of the mosehansen server has built in notification via IM w/ Jabber compliant IM clients. I haven't tried this yet, so if anyone out there has, and can say whether this is working well, or not, that'd be helpful. But in advance of such advice, the notification feature sounds pretty nifty and Esben has put a few links to various Jabber IM clients (which I'll be checking out soon ).

[Gandalf Parker]

magnate said:
How does the server notify you when the turn has been hosted (using quickhost)? With a PBEM it's there in your email. Assuming you don't want to stay permanently connected to the game server, how do you know? If you wait a couple of days (when you expected the turn to run), you lose all the benefit of quickhost.

Am I missing something?

There are switches for --preexec and --postexec which will gladly run a routine before or after running the host. In a strictly PbEM game Im guessing it would be used to email the turn files to each player. In a server game it shouldnt be hard to have it email a "HEY! the turn is DONE" message to the list of players (or IM or even a text message to my cell phone). Of course I would also probably use --preexec to make sequential backups of the .2h files before doing a host, and run the game with the --scoredump so that the --postexec can coy the score.html to a webdir for people to check on. Maybe some other neat tricks.

I LOVE that the server will run text-mode on a linux server. It makes doing things like that SOOOooooo easy. Im not sure how you would accomplish any of it on other systems but its there to play with.