Re: [Rails-devel] Simultaneous loading of a game

[Erik V. <eri...@hc...>]

Fascinating.
 
I'm thinking:
 
1. Would it be possible to describe this/these process(es) in a HOW-TO
document that Brett perhaps could publish on the Rails Sourceforge website,
so that other (potential) users could easily reuse it?
 
2. What could be added to Rails to facilitate this process?  I think
writing/renaming a token file and adding a player-specific postfix to the
save file name would be easy to implement, perhaps even be included in
1.0.7. However, that would require writing down specifications pretty
quickly. We could also plan another new release pretty soon after 1.0.7.
 
3. Further automation (such to do all this automatically at each turn
change, and perhaps even polling the dropbox) could be added later,
effectively creating a poor man's network playing facility indeed. 
 
I must say: the idea of not having to worry about overhauling the code to
create real networking in the near future (a much wanted facility) would
save us enormous amounts of time to invest in other new features.
 
Regards,
Erik.



  _____  

From: Jim Black [mailto:jim...@ya...] 
Sent: Monday 09 November 2009 19:07
To: Development list for Rails: an 18xx game
Subject: Re: [Rails-devel] Simultaneous loading of a game



On Nov 9, 2009, at 9:32 AM, Chris Shaffer wrote:


If you can coordinate each user loading the new saved game, I suspect


you could effect a sort of low-tech networked play.



Yeah, that's effectively what we have now.  We save and append the next
player's name to the save file, they see dropbox update the file and see
their name in the filename and know its their turn.



works like that here too, but here's the save protocol we use (similar, but
different) -

a) use UTC option so timestamps sequence properly
b) each player appends his-own-name to the save-file ('-jb', or whatever) 

c) there's an empty file in the folder, representing the "current player"
token.  whenever someone moves, they update this empty file, and rename it
to point to the next player. 

d) we also have an "archive" subfolder for each game folder, 

Other details:  
i.  This approach for initialing your own save-file ((b), above), makes it
easier to find/identify particular saved moves.
ii.  To supplement (b) and (d) for the game archive, I also drop other
empty/placeholder files in the folder, as bookmarks for the SR/OR
transitions. 
iii.  All these files are named appropriately (with the game prefix), so
that they all sequence in folder-browsing (from Rails, from browsing folders
externally, etc), with the "current move" token at the very end.   
iv.  Thus, I can always & quickly browse the current folders in my dropbox
(one per active game), see a short listing of the recent moves for each,
with the "current player" named at the end.

In this way, we get a decent archive (easy to browse the archive subfolder,
and identify key phases too- sr2, or3.1, etc), the current-player signaling
stuff ("token files") remains separate from the .rails move stuff ("save
files"), and notifications are easily both "pushed" (by dropbox
notifications when a move or token is updated), and "pulled" (naming and
archive conventions that make the folders very quick to browse, to review
current game states).

Anyway, I thought I'd share this in case any of its helpful to you.

-  jim