Pitboss 18 IT and Tech Issues Thread

[Caledorn]

Without civstats, we could use a separate stickied thread, where only turn progress would be posted.

This is the best manual workaround IMO. People post when they end turn, with info on how many players are left to play and how much time is left.

If it is possible to hotfix a game in progress we could go for this workaround.

That's going to be a chore to keep up with. Everyone has to count how many players haven't played their turn every time etc. If there's no other option, I guess we could try it - but people in general are lazy and forgetful, so I strongly suspect we'll run into trouble with people forgetting to post, or posting but not bothering to post anything else than "Done".

Google, why do you fail me?




That's the first time something I wrote turned up as the first Google search result for something I was searching for....

Hahaha! Priceless!

[wetbandit]

That's going to be a chore to keep up with. Everyone has to count how many players haven't played their turn every time etc. If there's no other option, I guess we could try it -
but people in general are lazy and forgetful, so I strongly suspect we'll run into trouble with people forgetting to post, or posting but not bothering to post anything else than "Done".

I agree that someone will inevitably fail to post in the Turn thread. I would hope that more than a few would at least post the time remaining on the clock. It appears, though, that the manual option may be the only method to replace Civstats. The counting issue could probably be solved by a script or spider which counts votes, similar to how votes are tallied in the WW games run here. That is an automated process at some level, right? When you finish your turn, post, and the script will record your turn end and posting time.

I'm not a Code Person, so I don't know anything about setting this up. A fix for civstats itself may be simpler, at some point, to do instead of this. I don't know. If this is feasible, players and/or admins would have to have access to the script in order to post the report at certain intervals and hopefully with time remaining on the clock.

FWIW, though, I'm not in any rush to get this game started, so an indefinite pause to resolve the Civstats issue is just fine with me.

[Cheater Hater]

Is there any way to tell if a person has ended their turn or not in the interface, other than the (glitched for small resolutions) score listing? Even if this gets resolved, it'll matter for turn splits whenever war breaks out.

[spacetyrantxenu]

The counting issue could probably be solved by a script or spider which counts votes, similar to how votes are tallied in the WW games run here. That is an automated process at some level, right? When you finish your turn, post, and the script will record your turn end and posting time.

That's kind of funny, but it would work. You'd post that you ended turn by writing

spacetyrantxenu

and at some point someone would post the vote tally. I guess the script could be changed to report who hasn't self-voted yet to show the players remaining to either end turn or clarify that they've already done so. That would at least bring some order to monitoring each turn's progress. But it would definitely be a cumbersome method and, as everything else mentioned so far that isn't Civstats, would do nothing for monitoring turn splits.

[Caledorn]

How about combining the Spanish mod with RBMod for this specific game? Would that be a massive undertaking? APTMod has built in email notifications, automatically handles turn splits etc. I know several of you disliked the mod, but if it lets us play the game..?

[spacetyrantxenu]

I was searching around earlier and came across an active game on Civstats with more than 18 players. I tracked the game down to the Civ community's forum and found the game subforum. It's in Polish so I was leaning on Google Translate to get through it, but maybe there's some information there about how they got Civstats to work with more than 18 players. But as I think on it, maybe 18 isn't the threshold that needs clearing, maybe it's some other arbitrary number over 18 and less than 34 that we'd need to find.

Civstats Game - KAC Dyplo 9

Community website - Civilization.org.pl

This may be easier for a native speaker to find -- does anyone read Polish? (2metraninja?)

[Cheater Hater]

If we just need to know what the number is where Civstats stops working, why not experiment? Just start with the largest game we've seen (25?), host a test game with that many players and see if you can connect Civstats to it--if not, we can continue looking for a work-around; if so, then either look for a larger game and/or keep working on our ad-hoc solutions.

[Dhalphir]

For what it's worth, I appreciate the suggestions by people to offer a manual replacement for civstats, but that is just not possible.

You only have to look at how even WITH Civstats and with half the amount of players, a game like PB13 has turn-playing issues from time to time. A game like this, with no civstats?

Caledorn would be reloading every other turn.

I'm also not sure reducing the number of players to a level that works with civstats is appropriate either - Commodore has made us a beast of a map and you can't just tweak a few players out of it.

[plako]

I did some preliminary investigation and I think I can make a special version of the Rbmod dll with these features:
* 3 files Timer.txt, score.txt, eventlog.txt. I'll write them all to hardcoded place C:\temp (timer contains current turn timer, score is all current scores and eventlog is described below)
* Timer and score updated every 2nd second (civ timer time not real time)
* eventlog updated, when player logs in , out and finishes turn + When the turn rolls (probably needs to be limited in size)
* Contents are just strings

I think we can start the game with these changes and code some kind of webpage that reads the contents of these files and displays it. I'll try to do this tomorrow evening or at minimum during the weekend unless someone else is willing to do it faster.

[novice]

I did some preliminary investigation and I think I can make a special version of the Rbmod dll with these features:
* 3 files Timer.txt, score.txt, eventlog.txt. I'll write them all to hardcoded place C:\temp (timer contains current turn timer, score is all current scores and eventlog is described below)
* Timer and score updated every 2nd second (civ timer time not real time)
* eventlog updated, when player logs in , out and finishes turn + When the turn rolls (probably needs to be limited in size)
* Contents are just strings

I think we can start the game with these changes and code some kind of webpage that reads the contents of these files and displays it. I'll try to do this tomorrow evening or at minimum during the weekend unless someone else is willing to do it faster.

That sounds great, plako. That should be the minimum changeset needed in the mod, allowing us to get started playing as soon as possible.

This could be complemented at a later time with a service that reads the score.txt file and logs score changes, and reads the eventlog.txt file and sends email notifications when the turn rolls.

Edit: And it would be good if the changes only affect the pitboss server and doesn't start generating text files on all the client computers.