Community challenge: Automated PBEM e-mailing

llamabeast · #1 January 4th, 2008, 05:51 PM

Zeldor was just commenting to me by PM that it would be really good to have a program to make playing PBEM games easier. A fair few players have commented that they find the faff of PBEM a bit annoying, with a few even refusing to play PBEM games because of it. I have to say I don't find it much of an issue myself - it takes maybe 5 seconds - but depending on e-mail client etc (webmail, eek!) it could be much worse than that.

Now there is a limit to what I can do in this area, not least because I'm currently channelling all my free coding time into LlamaServer improvements (hopefully should have some exciting new features soon). So, I thought I would throw it out to the community and see what ideas people can come up with.

For linux: It seems to me that it should be quite easy to come up with a nice script to automate e-mail sending. I have a perl script which does the actual sending bit, so someone would just need to create a little interface. The first time it's run it should ask for e-mail account details, the location of your dominions folder (or find it itself), and the games you're playing. Then when you run it you would just give it the name of the game whose turn you want to send off and it would do the rest. If a GUI could be added that would be excellent. Er, how do you go about making a GUI in Linux?

For Windows: I know nothing about programming in Windows. But a little program with a GUI and similar operation to the one above would be awesome.

For Mac: I know nothing.

Receiving e-mails: A considerable improvement to the above programs would be if it also was able to check your e-mail, filter for LlamaServer (or other PBEM) e-mails, download attachments from them and put them in the right place. And then if there are any new ones, open Dominions - how cool would that be?

I reckon these would be pretty quick projects for someone who knew what they were doing, and very useful.

Does anyone have any thoughts about the above? Ideas as to better ways of doing it?