PBEM server - first beta Online

Rowlff · #1 October 27th, 2004, 01:21 PM

Like discussed in the recent 'PBEM recommendations'-thread, I have been working on a fully automatic PBEM server for 'Dominions II'.
This system, while easy to install (needing only PHP5 and a cronjob), will allow people to host a large number of PBEM games with minimal admin supervision.

It's not done yet (which most of all means, that no games are actually hosted), but I have put a first working beta Online at

http://rowlff.dotgeek.org/domserv/

where you can already set up player accounts, create games, edit and join them, upload .2h files, ...

Please have a go at it, to find the inevitable bugs, give me your ideas, wishes, complaints!

I'll continue the work in the next days - and if I could take Gandalf up on his offer to use his server, we might have a working Version with live games soon (^_^)

-Marc

Gandalf Parker · #2 October 27th, 2004, 01:55 PM

Quote:

Rowlff said:
This system, while easy to install (needing only PHP5 and a cronjob), will allow people to host a large number of PBEM games with minimal admin supervision.

Only PHP5 and cron? Using comma dilimeted text files for a database? (which would be fine with me)

So this is going to be webbased PbEM? upload/download turm files and scripted "host & quit" cron jobs?

Rowlff · #3 October 27th, 2004, 02:24 PM

I use PHP 5's built in SQLite as a database (which is the reason I didn't go with the more widespread Version 4).
That gives me full SQL capabilities without having to install anything else...

And yes to your other question: The cron job will just have to call a 'runhost' script every hour (or whatever 'granularity' of schedule you prefer), and this automatically determines the games that are due for a host and runs them!

Gandalf Parker · #4 October 27th, 2004, 04:31 PM

It looks really good. Simple. Maybe even simple enough for me to understand the scripts.

PLEASE release it as a base workable Version and THEN start adding neat things.

As for hosting, thinking about getting a domain to go with it?
dommies.com
dominionist
dominionism
dominions2.net
dom2games.net
domgames.net
dom2taw.net
d2games.net

We can always tag it off of dom2minions.com but thats such a long name.

deccan · #5 October 27th, 2004, 07:06 PM

Way to go, that was fast work!

Rowlff · #6 October 27th, 2004, 07:16 PM

Good to hear that you seem to like it - it's still a way to go, when it comes to automatic hosting, though: The fact that there's no standalone server, and you have to more or less start the complete 'Dominions II'-application to do a simple host run, is a big problem.
So far, I haven't been able to do so from a php-script, but I am working on it (^_^)

Once this works (and I'm still confident), we can think about where to put it. And I will then immediately release it for everybody to play around with. Promise!

PashaDawg · #7 October 27th, 2004, 10:32 PM

Sounds cool. Dragonfire and I have 2 MP PBEM games going on. Maybe we can try to transfer them to your system to act as your guinea pigs.

Saeter · #8 October 28th, 2004, 10:26 AM

Quote:

Rowlff said:
The fact that there's no standalone server, and you have to more or less start the complete 'Dominions II'-application to do a simple host run, is a big problem.
So far, I haven't been able to do so from a php-script, but I am working on it (^_^)

What about using a regular shell script to do the actual execution of the application? Have a php script do the command syntax of turns ready to run, and save those in a file, but do the actual execution from a shell script. It would only have to look in the php-prepared command file and run them. Just a thought, I'm not into the details of either php5 or Dom2 capabilities.

Rowlff · #9 October 28th, 2004, 12:58 PM

I've tried this (and several other approaches) already! The problem remains that whatever way I try to open 'Dominions II', as soon as the original call is coming from PHP, 'Dominions II' can't start, because it can't connect to the Window Server (Error: "INIT_Processeses(), could not establish the default connection to the WindowServer."). Even using 'su' to pretend a normal user didn't help here...

Maybe it's due to me trying it on OS X. If somebody would like to give it a shot on Linux, I'll happily send him the appropriate scripts.

And does Illwinter read these threads? They should know a little something, too (^_^)

Gandalf Parker · #10 October 28th, 2004, 01:53 PM

Are you using text-only mode? Thats the only way I could get them to work. Are you looking for the start-game script or the process-turn script?