| Re: Stars! Project Organization |
Mon, 21 May 2012 21:17   |
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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).
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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)
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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.
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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.
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..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.
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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.
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If multiplayer games were easier to manage and play, I bet there'd be a lot more activity going on.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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