Dolphin - EA game - restarted

[Micah]

The forges of Ulm are open and offering items of construction level 4 and lower for approx. base gem cost. PM for specific details, availability and price.

[Baalz]

Paying 35 gold per water gem.

[llamabeast]

Baalz, I only just saw your comment a few posts up. That's interesting, I will try to take a look at that.

[llamabeast]

Oh hang on, I don't understand the bug. Presumably if you send in a turn for the wrong game (let's say you intended to send a turn for game A but sent one for game B), it just accepts it as a valid turn for B and sends you a receipt back. How is it meant to know that you intended to send it a 2h for game A? Just run it past me again, I'm probably being a bit slow.

[Baalz]

Here's exactly the behavior I saw.
Take a turn for Dolphin, submit it correctly.
Receive receipt for Dolphin.
Take turn for Allegiance, accidentally include Dolphin's turn in reply rather than Allegiance.
Receive no receipt or problem notice.
Dolphin hosts correctly, Allegiance stales (I didn't notice that I never received a receipt until after the stale).

So, presumably at some point my Allegiance turn submission was rejected (it was the wrong nation, wrong era, wrong turn, etc.), but I didn't get a notice. Seems like you indicated I should get a notice if the turn was rejected, but I didn't so seems like a bug. Also, my suggestion above (which may not be necessary if you catch this type of error elsewhere) was to check that the attachment name "early_sauromatia.trn" matched the subject line "Dolphin, Sauromatia turn 21".

[llamabeast]

Ah, now the thing is that the llamaserver doesn't look at the subject line at all. I always send my turns in with blank subject lines. It only works out what game the turn is for by looking at the file itself. So it has no way of knowing that you sent it a different file than you intended to.

As for the receipt I would be willing to bet that you received a second receipt for Dolphin, but didn't take any notice of it, assuming it was an erroneous repeat or something. Try it next time.

I'm not quite sure what change I can make to improve this situation. I don't want it to look at the e-mail's subject line you see, since that increases the faff factor for using the server significantly. Sending blank e-mails with just the attachment is very convenient.

[Baalz]

So I'm curious, if it doesn't look at the subject line how does it know what game I'm submitting a turn for? Its not the case now, but potentially I could be playing the same nation same era on two different games.

It's possible I got a second receipt for Dolphin and didn't notice, I'll test this out tonight when I get home.

[llamabeast]

So, if it finds a 2h file it sticks it in a directory called savedgames/test and gets Dominions to verify it ('dom3 --verify test'). This produces a .chk file, which gives a few lines of useful info. Crucially it gives a 'game number' which is lots of digits long and unique to a particular game, and a turn number - so that's enough information. This also has the advantage that it checks that the file isn't corrupt or anything in the process.

[Baalz]

Ah, cool, I misunderstood how that was working. I had thought the subject line was important, but since I don't need anything other than the .2h file I think I'll just write a script myself which launches the game then automatically emails the turn to llamaserver.net afterwards so I won't have to do (or screw up) anything manually.

[llamabeast]

Sounds like a cunning plan.

It's extremely convenient actually that Dominions has the 'verify' action and can recognise what games 2h files are for and so on - it reduces the possibility for errors hugely. Thanks Johan!