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

[brett l. <wak...@gm...>]

Yeah, this could easily be a checkbox in the startup options.
Something along the lines of "PBEM (via Dropbox)"

---Brett.



On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Erik Vos <eri...@hc...> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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