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Stars! Project Organization Mon, 21 May 2012 20:42 Go to next message
gible

 
Commander

Messages: 1343
Registered: November 2002
Location: Wellington, New Zealand

On Tue, May 22, 2012 Gible Fog & Gargan Roo emailed...
>>On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 10:33 AM, Gargan Roo wrote:
>><snip> Feel free to get in touch and exchange niceties and whatnot, I'll try to put together some ideas and organizational structures where people can interface and brainstorm in a private manner.

>On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 6:38 PM, Gible Fog wrote:
>lol..that's probably a lot more organising than is worth doing. I've been working on Stars!wiki since I created it, and in all that time there's only been one other significant editor, and that was only at the beginning.

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 11:01 AM, Gargan Roo wrote:
My main goal in this is to create something that would allow a player to manage multiplayer games through the website. Say someone wants to join a game, they simply log in and visit the game queue page. On said page they would find a list of games in queue to be started upon the meeting of one or more arbitrary values (e.g. number of participating players, a time limit, etc). Upon starting, the website would make the relevant game files automatically available on the website to the active players and would remind them via an email when the end-of-turn time limit was about to be reached. The players would upload their turn via the web interface at their leisure within this time period, and would notify all players when everyone had officially submitted their turn and move everything to the next year, allowing the players to then download the next set of relevant files.

Essentially I'm looking to streamline the multiplayer process entirely via a web interface. Picking relevant data out of the save files to populate a sort of automatically recorded game history and using it to create statistical data and the like is just icing on the cake. I'm doing the same thing with Dwarf Fortress bloodline games, wherein a player will play the game for an in-game year and pass the save to the next in line along with a dramatized history of what happened during their rule; some fairly ridiculous and awesome things have come about from doing this but currently the process is hindered by everyone being disjointed and just throwing up files on mediafire and posting succession histories with no regard to posterity.

I don't think any real technical work would be needed to make this happen since it's really just manipulating unrelated textual player data and juggling some files around, unless I'm seriously mistaken about the level of technicalities that go on behind the scenes of a successful multiplayer turn, at which point I could probably just interface with the autohost software (isn't it just a perl script?), although I'd like to internalize everything eventually. Isn't this made to be a purely email-based game without any special tools? If so, it sounds fairly trivial in nature to clean up the multiplayer process to an all-online experience without really having to interact with any admins.

Totally digging the API project though, I'm sure I'll be able to make use of it on a technical level during its progress but it's not my main concern. If multiplayer games were easier to manage and play, I bet there'd be a lot more activity going on.

Thoughts?

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Re: Stars! Project Organization Mon, 21 May 2012 21:17 Go to previous messageGo to next message
gible

 
Commander

Messages: 1343
Registered: November 2002
Location: Wellington, New Zealand

Allow me to separating things a bit.. Creating games & getting players, managing existing games (host and players). For some of these you're essentially reinventing the wheel. I'm not saying that's a bad idea but you might want to at least investigate reusing the spokes or something. You say you've "been lurking the autohost community for several years" but I know from experience that job-ideal Stars! tools often slip past unnoticed so I'm not sure how much you're aware of.

Creating games & getting players
On Tue, May 22, 2012 Gible Fog & Gargan Roo emailed

Say someone wants to join a game, they simply log in and visit the game queue page. On said page they would find a list of games in queue to be started upon the meeting of one or more arbitrary values (e.g. number of participating players, a time limit, etc).

On the one hand, we already have the new games forum, which for many games is quite relevant as the players hash out the game details etc with the host. On the other, for games that need no discussion (or indeed once the discussion is finished) some sort of create a game interface would reduce the barrier for some. There is an appeal to not having to interact with the community to negotiate participation.

managing existing games (host and players)
Quote:

My main goal in this is to create something that would allow a player to manage multiplayer games through the website. Upon starting, the website would make the relevant game files automatically available on the website to the active players and would remind them via an email when the end-of-turn time limit was about to be reached. The players would upload their turn via the web interface at their leisure within this time period, and would notify all players when everyone had officially submitted their turn and move everything to the next year, allowing the players to then download the next set of relevant files.
Another wheel... SAH already does most of this and a few other things besides. The only thing SAH doesn't do is send email when the time limit is imminent. and my favourite feature you haven't asked for is that it emails turn to people when they're ready - I don't have to go and get it. And if I have a lot of turns to manage (eg if I'm hosting and keeping an eye on player activity) I'll use the SAH Client.

Quote:

..at which point I could probably just interface with the autohost software (isn't it just a perl script?), although I'd like to internalize everything eventually.
SAH doesn't strictly have an API interface, but an API-like summary of a game's meta data in csv?(I forget) that SAH Client uses. But yes, its a website and therefore interfacing.

Quote:

If multiplayer games were easier to manage and play, I bet there'd be a lot more activity going on.
Quite probably. There is an entire section of the utilities on the wiki devoted to m and x file management which probably means 1) it _is_ a problem and 2) it's not a simple fix. SAH really fits into that list too and it's easily been the most successful. Personally I would build P2P Stars! functionality into SAH Client - its kind of already there in the form of handling local games - it just need abstracting the hosting and an efficient means of passing turns around. It's in my maybe eventually basket.

Quote:

Isn't this made to be a purely email-based game without any special tools? If so, it sounds fairly trivial in nature to clean up the multiplayer process to an all-online experience without really having to interact with any admins.
sure...tho, given the demand, I question how much it needs cleaning up. I have no idea how Ron would feel about being disconnected like that. Certainly you're welcome to create an alternative to SAH of course. You certain wouldn't be the first.

Quote:

Picking relevant data out of the save files to populate a sort of automatically recorded game history and using it to create statistical data and the like is just icing on the cake. I'm doing the same thing with Dwarf Fortress bloodline games, wherein a player will play the game for an in-game year and pass the save to the next in line along with a dramatized history of what happened during their rule; some fairly ridiculous and awesome things have come about from doing this but currently the process is hindered by everyone being disjointed and just throwing up files on mediafire and posting succession histories with no regard to posterity.
I'm not even sure how relevant this is to Stars! though some players RPG up their games and there's plenty of discussion in the game-specific forums. Quite possibly I'm just too far out of practise vis a vis actually playing.


Something that will be needed and doesn't exist yet, is all of this ^^^ for Stars! Nova

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Re: Stars! Project Organization Sat, 26 May 2012 14:02 Go to previous message
Aeglos is currently offline Aeglos

 
Chief Warrant Officer 1
Stars! Nova developer
Stars! Nova developer

Messages: 142
Registered: May 2011
Location: Chile
Did someone say Stars! Nova? Very Happy

One of the reasons we moved the forums from Sourceforge to here was to recieve feedback, ideas and co-operate more closely with the community, so we'd love to accomodate as many things that are needed/wanted as we can (manpower permitting).

Sadly the development has slowed down due to devs drifting away from the project (hopefully they'll return) and due to massive restructurings that were needed to make the game work 'properly'. Now, most of those restructurings are done and we're slowly pushing forward to a release, even if not fully complete yet.

In regards to the above, all of Nova files are plain XML. There are also plans for our server to run stand-alone without the client to facilitate network games. We haven't planned or even talked much about how to automate the multiplayer experience though. A web interface could work, or the client could include a "submit turn to this server ip:" option.

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