New & raw web based Dominion II game server

[Daynarr]

Originally posted by Esben Mose Hansen:
4. How would you all feel if players could see one anothers details, like jabber id, email address, experience and so on? Only logged in players could do this, of course.

You could allow players that are in the same game to see each others e-mail, as well. Of course, there should be an account option to ask players if they want to reveal such information (disabled by default).

[Yossar]

Originally posted by Esben Mose Hansen:
P.S: About TentoTangedeux, this is the stats.txt file from Last turn:

Abysia played this turn
Pythium didn't play this turn
Man played this turn
Ulm played this turn
C'tis didn't play this turn
Arcoscephale played this turn
Ermor didn't play this turn
Pangaea played this turn
R'lyeh played this turn
T'ien Ch'i played this turn

So you have at worst three stale players. You could send them an ingame message and ask them to identify themselves or be killed.

I know Ermor hasn't taken a turn in a long time. My armies have been walking around in his territory with no resistance for a while.

Pretty sure Pythium is out too. Inexplicably, nobody has attacked them, but army size, research, provinces, and income have all been flat for about 6 turns.

Not sure about C'tis. They're one of the strongest nations in the game so I'd be surprised, but you never know.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by Esben Mose Hansen:
1. I've uploaded a new Version. It's mostly adminstrative changes, but I did include the option to "deconfess" to playing a nation. Note that the administrative bit was introduction of player group accesses, so it's quite possible it will go horrible wrong.

Let me know when you get around to packaging the web interface.

4. How would you all feel if players could see one anothers details, like jabber id, email address, experience and so on? Only logged in players could do this, of course.

From experience I would make it a game option, or leave it off. Known players is something we have from creating games here in the forum. Its been a common request to have some easy way to do anonymous games. Some players feel too restricted by playing within their personal reputations. For instance, "Gandalf Parker" is much more likely to never break an alliance agreement than "PsudoNym" is.

So you have at worst three stale players. You could send them an ingame message and ask them to identify themselves or be killed.

In my notes about making a web game server (until you shot way ahead of me) I was considering creating a subdirectory for each game and making it an option to have stats and score file put there. Possibly other game info such as a way for players to converse and still maintain their login aliases.

[Norfleet]

Here's a big suggestion that could potentially take some work to implement, but be very awesome:

1. Don't use the Dominions II pretender upload interface: It's too prone to undesirable behaviors like accidental starting or overwriting. Instead, make people upload and delete their pretenders for the game through their web interface: That way, nobody can overwrite somebody else's slot, start the game prematurely, etc.

2. Implement AWOL tracking: A player has obviously staled when, at the time of a turn generation, his .trn file exists and is more recent than his .2h: If this occurs for several turns in a row, perhaps a number of turns determined at game setup, the player can be deemed to be AWOL. Since he had to submit his pretender through the web interface, the server now knows who he is: Display his AWOLness on the game status screen, and mark it on his permanent record.

3. Allow a player to hand his slot over to another player. Allow a player deemed to be AWOL to have his slot taken over by another player, if he did not password and can be subbed.

4. Configure the game setup such that the creator of a game can disallow a player who has more than X games AWOL to join: Thus, if BillyBob has gone AWOL in 3 games, and I wish to start a zero-tolerance game, such that no player who has ever gone AWOL may join, this player may not join the game. The caveat being that an unruly game-wrecker may attempt to create a second account to get around this. Also allow it such that games can be restricted to allow only those whose accounts were created BEFORE the game was created, or some other fixed date/offset. As a stopgap measure to reduce this occurrence, disallow anyone whose IP/email matches that of a player who has been recorded as going AWOL from creating another account. This won't catch them all, but it'll certainly make this harder, and be fairly trivial to implement.

[rabelais]

Mose, have you put in any anti-overwrite protection yet?

Love your site, btw. You Rock.


Is this a bug or a *new* feature?

Upon a mild change of strategic heart, I tried to overwrite my own pretender well before the start, but the pretender I ended up with is my first Version.

Is this new MP overwrite protection, or just me somehow screwing up?

If the former case, how *does* one amend one's design?


Rabe the Revisionist

[Gandalf Parker]

Stopping overwrite:
Its kludgy but I was just doing some quick thinking on it.

Set the game to not be auto-started. Set a cron to watch the game directory and copy each upload to a safety directory renamed from name.2h to name+number+login.2h and when the game starts then copy them back to the game directory in reverse order for hosting. That way Man2joe.2h will be overwriteen by Man1bob.2h just before hosting.

Offer the Users login an option to delete a file created by their login so that Bob can delete Man1bob.2h allowing Man2bob.2h to be used when the game is created.

Like I said, kludgy. But something like that. Hole the uploaded files somewhere until the game is first hosted then select the ones which should be used. Heck its Linux. There is probably a hundred ways of doing it. Some use of RCS or CVS commands (which Ive always avoided). Probably the easiest would be to go to a php script or using zope to make uploads go thru the web page so you can control its actions.

[Norfleet]

Or you could just make it so pretenders are uploaded on through the web interface instead: This will force it so firstly, only registered Users can play, and as a result, you'll know who's in the game: Thus, people can be penalized by blacklisting them in their permanent records if they go AWOL from games, even without having to be identified publicly....as most of the AWOLers are also the anonymous Users, with the new confession option.

With that in place, you could then setup a mechanism to disallow AWOLers from joining games with the low/no tolerance for AWOLness options enabled.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

1. The source is here:

Dominion 2 host pages source
Note that it is licensed under GPL v2, viral and all. This means that if you modify and distribute it, you must publish the source. Also, the license notifications must be included.

2. Been a bit busy lately. I've just updated the pages, The only visible change is that it is now possible to set a master password. If anyone knows what this is supposed to be good for, please tell me. The only effect I can see/find is that "master password is enabled" appear in the game settings in the game. Please verify your findings --- you can use the TestGame005 if you please. Ulm doesn't have a password; and the password is "testpassword". The other two nations does have passwords --- these are "palm".

Regarding all the player stealing mess: I'm trying to find a solution. I want it to be in-game and as transparant as possible The best solution would, of course, be if the games themselves could be password protected. Why Illwinter didn't include this feature is beyond me. Maybe for next Version? Anyway, keep the suggestions coming, they are very useful

Have a nice night!

[Norfleet]

The test game is crowding the slottage. Could you please stop the thing so we can bring the other regular games back up?

Also, master pass is mostly useless for people to set on your server: You may as well set a global server masterpass manually, because only the local host is able to use master pass. It's useless to use it from remote, it will still say "wrong password" and reject.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

Well, sorry for taking up a slot on my own server I've stopped the game now.

Pity about the masterpass thing. It is completely useless (for me) as I cannot run anything but textmode on my server. So much for that idea for removing stale players by making them computercontrolled. Back to the drawing board