Civ4 PitBoss Available

ceiph said:
so ideally we could play a game to get the first turns worked out than save, load the game on pitboss and continue from there?

Why do that - I don't think it would work tbh. You would start a game with pitboss. If your buddies are all connected it will play exactly like a MP game in terms of speed - i.e you do not need to disconnect between turns. Where it differs is you can easily disconnect and reconnect and you will get an email (when that aspect works) to let you know a turn is generated.

Tals
 
1. Fix Pwd issue
2. allow minimise to tray
3. Ability to force a turn (not just a time set one)
4. Ability to amend some of the server settings once game has started:
eg game pwd/ turn limit not sure on the other ones

5. Interesting enough - not sure what the email format is but as pitboss does not know what the server admin email address is (not input it anywhere) not sure what it will say the email is from. In email should indicate at a minimum who it is from and the game name - otherwise if you are playing muliple pitboss games you won't know which one the email relates to.

Tals

p.s in the civiv.ini I see an email address setting so this is possibly where you set the email address for the server side
 
6. If you are the last player doing a turn (Simulateneous game) it will flash the end turn button to indicate your turn is over - even if you have not completed the turn

7. Force AI - not sure what this does, regardless of what this is set to if you kick a player the AI takes over

Tals
 
8. Looking in the civiv.ini, looks like lots of amendments and maybe this is where server settings can be changed once a game is running. Auto save defaults to every turn - however autosave is not working so except for the initial map creation save no further saves are being done - unless forced

p.s actually not that many amendments (i.e to change settings such as turn time) on closer look but auto save is there - just doesn't work
 
I would refrain from setting up an email with Alt D as it apparently corrupts the game likely due to the fact that email notification has not been coded yet, completely.

Pitboss never promised company server games, just that it was comimg sometime in december, there was hardly any info publicly available at all.

As to the AI takeover issue from your description you never tested it at all, AI take over in pitboss is just like it is in a regular MP game, if you quit or retire the AI takes over your Civ, rather than the other option of your civ being destroyed. You just let the turn roll over and the game was just waiting for you to take your turn. If you want to test AI take over, Alt Q(retire) from the game, let the turn roll over, then rejoin the game and the same civ, who will find that the Civ is still there and available to anyone, it will even ask you to enter a new pw for your Civ.

In reality Pitboss is nothing more than a stripped down server app that provides a near-MP game that uses all the same code as MP except that you can set turn rollover time limits.

For those that want to run pitboss on a lower end machine on your home LAN, that will work fine, I've done it for ages in testing pitboss, but one thing you will have to do, is to set the port on the pitboss machine to something other than 2056(you can do this in the ini) and then tell your router/gateway computer to forward all requests for that port to your pitboss server machine. I've done this with a router and set it up with winXP ICS on a gateway computer.

Remeber pitboss is a beta, so there will be bugs and likely features that you want to see. All suggestions are welcome as well as bug reports.

CS
 
CS - thx for the responses

As to the AI takeover issue from your description you never tested it at all, AI take over in pitboss is just like it is in a regular MP game, if you quit or retire the AI takes over your Civ, rather than the other option of your civ being destroyed. You just let the turn roll over and the game was just waiting for you to take your turn. If you want to test AI take over, Alt Q(retire) from the game, let the turn roll over, then rejoin the game and the same civ, who will find that the Civ is still there and available to anyone, it will even ask you to enter a new pw for your Civ.

Yep not tested much at all other than in pitboss doing the kick and it showed the AI had taken over - was difficult to test without any info on what it was meant to do :) But now makes sense. Sounds like it could do with the ability to retire or retire and let AI take over. But either way its a minor point in the scheme of things.

I would refrain from setting up an email with Alt D as it apparently corrupts the game likely due to the fact that email notification has not been coded yet, completely.

I'm not sure if this was known before but it would have helped to understand this - I spent literally hours on Friday night playing with all of the permuations available (because I couldn't believe this had been missed) - I appretiate that we are beta testing this - but this is a major issue for a persistant server - not even sure how you would hope to run pitboss as it is intended without some form of notification that a turn has been genned.

Port forwarding - yep done this and it works fine. I use direct connect but then I can't really see why you'd do a pitboss through gamespy - these are games that I imagine may go on for weeks if not months :)

I've now stopped any more work on it - unless something additional is posted in here - need the email working to use this thing properly in anger.

Tals

p.s I should add that I am pleased that Firaxis have allowed us to see it even at this stage, it gives confidence that the feature I really purchased the game for is on its way and pretty much as I had hoped it would work. Just be useful to have an indication on when the next updates are likely ;)
 
tals said:
5. Interesting enough - not sure what the email format is but as pitboss does not know what the server admin email address is (not input it anywhere) not sure what it will say the email is from. In email should indicate at a minimum who it is from and the game name - otherwise if you are playing muliple pitboss games you won't know which one the email relates to.

Tals

p.s in the civiv.ini I see an email address setting so this is possibly where you set the email address for the server side

I would agree to the minimize to the tray request, and ofcourse take care of the email/pw bug and fix the autosave issue. The ability to force a turn to end before the turn timer has run out would be good and likely not hard to code.

As to changing server settings after you start the game, that is likely a more difficult thing to do, as these are things are drawn from the same MP code as MP games use, and you can't change a pw or game length after you start a MP game either, it's just not something that anyone ever wanted so it didn't get coded.

But ya never know, it doesn't hurt to ask.

CS
 
tals said:
CS - thx for the responses



Yep not tested much at all other than in pitboss doing the kick and it showed the AI had taken over - was difficult to test without any info on what it was meant to do :) But now makes sense. Sounds like it could do with the ability to retire or retire and let AI take over. But either way its a minor point in the scheme of things.



I'm not sure if this was known before but it would have helped to understand this - I spent literally hours on Friday night playing with all of the permuations available (because I couldn't believe this had been missed) - I appretiate that we are beta testing this - but this is a major issue for a persistant server - not even sure how you would hope to run pitboss as it is intended without some form of notification that a turn has been genned.

Port forwarding - yep done this and it works fine. I use direct connect but then I can't really see why you'd do a pitboss through gamespy - these are games that I imagine may go on for weeks if not months :)

I've now stopped any more work on it - unless something additional is posted in here - need the email working to use this thing properly in anger.

Tals

p.s I should add that I am pleased that Firaxis have allowed us to see it even at this stage, it gives confidence that the feature I really purchased the game for is on its way and pretty much as I had hoped it would work. Just be useful to have an indication on when the next updates are likely ;)

Email notification was always a planned feature, it just didn't get done in time for this release. But if you set a game to 24hr Simutaineous turns, it shouldn't be hard to run games with every player konwing that he/she just has to play a turn atleast once every 24hrs.

CS
 
Email notification was always a planned feature, it just didn't get done in time for this release. But if you set a game to 24hr Simutaineous turns, it shouldn't be hard to run games with every player konwing that he/she just has to play a turn atleast once every 24hrs.

You could although with email in the flow of the game will be much quicker - unless you are continually in the game from the client side - but certainly worth a thought and i'll put it to my guys whether they fancy starting a game. Of course the file format is likely to change when they implement the email correctly so you have to play to assume the game is not going to last.

I assume this thread is the best place to post bugs/enhancements?

Tals
 
Does the server 'lock out' players at any point. Just setup a 10 player game and from time to time people are not able to connect (players will be connected in game) - even me within the network. I haven't yet worked out if it is because it won't allow players in when a player is setting up or another reason. I'll keep monitoring but definitelly something strange.

Its on a windows 98 se machine so another reason could be that if I am in people outside my network can't get in and if people are in from outside my network I can't get in. Would that make sense. Either way useful for some thoughts on this and I will post more as the game develops.

Tals
 
I found a temporary workaround for the change email and get locked out by password issue:
If you didnt have a password set when you set the email, then your password will be:
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e

If you had a password set already, then unless you have a md5 utility already, download http://www.fourmilab.ch/md5/md5.zip and unzip into some dir..
run cmd, cd to the dir where you put md5.exe and type:

md5 -l -d"your old password"

Eg:
md5 -l -d"test"
gives : 098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6

The string you get will be the password you can log in with.
(in case you wondered: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e is the md5 of an empty string)
 
There is an easier way :) As long as you have take over AI (I now understand that now). Then you just get the host to kick the player who has corrupted his password he then reenters and sets the password again. Works nicely. As even just going into alt d corrupts it is vital as well.

Now some requests :)

Can we have a last accessed time against each player - that way easy to see which players are checking etc

Also state of their play - i.e have they submitted yet or not - that way host will be able to tell at a glance who is outstanding and chase if necessary, ratherthan having to go in game

Also a set password against a player would be useful that way you coul dlock the game out - particularly if you wanted to open the game to everyone but wanted some reserved slots for friends.

Timestamp on the chat window would also be useful.

That's it for the mo - i'll think of more i'm sure :)

Tals
 
I see that the PittBoss set up screens ask for Player 0. What does that mean? If I want to set up a game for 5 human players -- do I set it up players 0 through 4 or 1 through 5?

Just a little confused.
 
You just let the turn roll over and the game was just waiting for you to take your turn.

I'm not sure I understand this.

If the game waits for a player to take a turn, no matter if the timer expires or not, what is the sense of a timer?

I thought it would be that if a player has not taken a turn within the set time, the AI would then take over. Now you're saying that a player has to manually quit for the AI to take over.


Alanb
 
A couple of requests...

Would there be any way to have a minimum time before a new turn is genned?
An example of where this would be necessary: You and a couple of friends want to start a PTBS game where you all have to play a turn once a day. The only time that you can do your turn today is at 9 AM, but you won't be able to do the next turn until 6 PM the next day. This should be fine under the assumption that you would play one turn a day, but if there's no minimum turn limit, the turn could be genned earlier than 6 PM (if all of your friends play early that day), and thus your planned time of 6 PM would be after the 24 hour turn limit. Even better would be if players could designate that they would like to bypass a minimum (if there is one), so if for instance all of the players are online at the same time they could play a couple turns in a row.

Another thing I noticed, but did not test extensively, is that if a player sends a message to all, anyone who was not online at the time does not get any record of the message being sent. If there's any way that these messages could be broadcasted to a player as he joins, they could show in the Chat Log as "offline messages".

Finally, if there was a way to track whether a player is online or not, other than messaging "Is anyone online?", that would be helpful. But I realize these last two things would probably require a patch to the game itself, rather than an improvement to the Pitboss server, so I can imagine they probably wouldn't be high priority.

If I'm wrong about any of these things, please let me know, as I have not done extensive testing; I've only played with Pitboss a little bit. Thanks!
 
Alan_Bernardo said:
I'm not sure I understand this.

If the game waits for a player to take a turn, no matter if the timer expires or not, what is the sense of a timer?

I thought it would be that if a player has not taken a turn within the set time, the AI would then take over. Now you're saying that a player has to manually quit for the AI to take over.

It works just like regular MP. If a player does not take their turn in the set amount of time, then the computer just processes all the turns and moves on as if that person did nothing on their turn. Basically, it presses the "end turn" button for every player at the moment the timer expires. You don't lose your seat for failing to take a turn, you just lose that turn.

I'm not sure if the feature exists, but someone should have the power to force the AI to take over another player in the case where a player obviously is no longer playing but failed to actually quit. Or maybe if you miss x turns in a row, the computer takes over for you; but to do it after 1 turn by default would probably be more annoying.
 
Randle said:
I'm not sure if the feature exists, but someone should have the power to force the AI to take over another player in the case where a player obviously is no longer playing but failed to actually quit. Or maybe if you miss x turns in a row, the computer takes over for you; but to do it after 1 turn by default would probably be more annoying.

Yep, there's a "kick" button on the Pitboss admin panel. Nothing automatic though.
 
I'm not sure if the feature exists, but someone should have the power to force the AI to take over another player in the case where a player obviously is no longer playing but failed to actually quit. Or maybe if you miss x turns in a row, the computer takes over for you; but to do it after 1 turn by default would probably be more annoying.

The server operator can kick a player, it will then revert to AI. If you had the take over AI set then another player could then join instead

Tals
 
By the way, I have a request: make PbMain (entrypoint) customizable/overrideable. Possibly with an INI option. That way, we could easily write new wizards and admin panels without replacing core assets. We could add things like remote admin, GUI-less operation, config preset loading, additional admin options, etc.

Also, another nice thing (non-PB) would be the ability to launch Civ4 and auto-connect to an IP+port. Preferably by a command-line switch or something.
 
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