Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » The Bar » We need to save Stars!
| Re: We need to save Stars! |
Wed, 30 October 2019 23:23   |
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 ricks03 |
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Messages: 222
Registered: January 2012
Location: NC | |
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My one thing to make it more usable (for me at least) was creating a web hosting program with a different feature set than Autohost, because AutoHost is from the same era as Stars, (i.e. not open source) so it didn't work how we played. Still even under active, if intermittent development (although I admit I don't regularly update it on Github because, if nothing else, the only person using it is me  )
Also in part because the thing that was killing Stars for me was people dropping out, and no way to replace them if they'd password protected--a problem I solved. My hosting program does need better checking of turn validity, it does the basics, but can't tell if a .x file is truly hacked. That detection code has already been written, it's just secretively squirreled away.
It shouldn't be hard to set up my hosting program in a Windows VM (were people to try, I think we could hammer out the problems in instructions fairly quickly). I haven't been interested in creating a public Hosting Windows VM due to Windows Licensing issues. I've thought about separating the host and client so that the front end is a linux VM, and the back end is a windows box hosting to make the web server side more secure, but at the moment that's hardly a big deal. A amazon web instance, running virtual box, running XP would work. Or running Wine and converting the DB to mysql/maria.
However, there's a perfectly fine hosting program in AutoHost, so creating hosting shouldn't be an issue, the problem is on the client side.
An easy-to-use VM is critical to adoption. The efforts for StarsWine are core here, and should be sticky on top of everything. I created a virtualbox Stars! VM that I can hand people to get them up and almost instantly running, but windows licensing an issue, even for XP.
Stars! being available on Steam or Gog is also brilliant. I know there used to be a cracked version of stars out there that would open any file that didn't have a password (someone flipped the order of the check).
I'm in the same school of thought that I think keygen should be open. Keeping that process secret is a component of why the Stars! is shutting down - the community is secretive. That encourages closed frustrating systems, not open inviting ones. The risk from keys is sharing/reuse, not from generating them. The odds of two people having identical keys when they were all generated fresh and being in the same ~8 player game are effectively zero (even if there were only 1000 keys, that'd ~ 1 in a million). And if they are duplicates, you just back up a turn and fix it with a newly generated key.
If keys are open, the host could easily just create keys for everyone in the game, or validate everyone's keys, because THEY WOULDN'T BE SECRET. There is no real reason for key gen to be secret. People could publish their key, send it to a host, or keep it in their user profile when a game is hosted.
I still advertise and get new players among friends of mine and folks I meet at board game conventions. An interesting story that I was talking to someone at a Con and, as they sounded interested in old school strategy games, mentioned Stars! and they said, "Oh you're THAT Rick Steeves". I get that a lot because of the guy on PBS, but it was the first time that Stars! did it!
https://www.irelandbybicycle.com
http://totalhost.sinister.net:999
https://github.com/ricks03/TotalHostReport message to a moderator
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