PlayYourTurn.com -- Successor Site to CivStats: Track Pitboss Games Online!

[Inverse Icarus]

I'm kind of new to CivFanatics, but I was a Pollytubbie for a long while, going under the name "Uber Krux" and "Inverse Icarus". I participated in the Civ III ISDG on their team, if that means anything to anyone, but enough for introductions.

Today marks the official public beta of PlayYourTurn.com, a Civilization IV Turn Tracker and Event Logger.

PlayYourTurn.com is intended to be a successor to CivStats, which hasn't had a major update in over two years. It started off with adding the new options and civilizations in Beyond the Sword, and quickly I found myself adding new interesting features.

The coolest feature so far, in my opinion, are the embeddable, customizable score graphs. For example, here is the last 10 turns of the game I'm currently playing with 2 friends:



That image is dynamic. That is to say that when we play more turns, the image will update itself. I don't have to edit my post and add a new image, PlayYourTurn.com takes care of all that for you.

You can customize a bunch of things like this. For example, here's the same graph with 30 turns, the lower-scoring AIs removed.



You can also "tag" events. For example, you can tag an "Ended Turn" event with "The Sumerians completed the Pyramids!", or "The Dutch declare war on the aggressive Native Americans." The event log can tell a story about your game.

In addition to these neat graphs and tags, you get event lists for your games, much like CivStats. You can see score changes, turn ended events, logins, etc. A large portion of the design was actually taken from the CivStats page. OverloadUT had a good design, so I borrowed some of the best looking things. Emails to his account bounced back, and he hasn't been online here since August, so this is without permission. If he wants me to change the design, I would be happy to do so, but as mentioned before, he has a very slick design.

The game I'm playing with my friends can be viewed here, so you can take a look at the site yourself.

As mentioned in the most recent news post on the site, there is absolutely no reason you cannot run this turn tracker in addition to CivStats. I promise my uploader will play nice. You can use CivStats are your primary tool and still help me by beta testing the site. When you feel completely comfortable switching over, you can.

If you're currently administering a Pitboss game and use CivStats, I'd ask you to please try my website out.

I appreciate any and all feedback and bug reports from everyone. You can post here, or email me at joe@playyourturn.com.

 

[Elkad]

Looks good.

The "claim this civ" feature could be a bit more obvious. Figuring out to click the little hand by the civ name took a while.

 

[Inverse Icarus]

Thanks for the feedback Elkad.

I'm more of a backend guy, and not a designer, so the little "clever" things I did for the interface might not always be intuitive. Feedback on the design / interaction like this is greatly appreciated.

I've gotten some other emails with bugs and suggestions, and will be working on the site / uploader some more later today.

Keep 'em coming!

 

[Kaleb]

Looks great! how are you going to handle messaging in this? would be great to be able to send messages to multiple people if that's possible. I love the messaging option in civstats as it saves me filling up my civfanatics mailbox

 

[Inverse Icarus]

I currently have no plans to add messaging on the site, but it's a feature I could add in the future.

The easiest solution would be to just have it send emails behind the scenes. You click on a button and submit a form, and the website emails the user associated with the player you sent the message to. This would keep the users and the emails anonymous, and still allow communication.

Any other solution would involve a lot of development, unless there's some WordPress plugin that allows private messaging for users. Again, something for the future, but right now I'm working on getting the primary features up and the bugs resolved.

 

[Elkad]

Messaging is a Civstats feature I use heavily. And having it stored on the server means if a civ changes owners, the new owner can look at old messages regarding alliances and such.

Incidentally, you do have a feature where the game admin can kick a civ owner to allow a new player to take control of it, correct?

 

[Inverse Icarus]

Messaging is a Civstats feature I use heavily. And having it stored on the server means if a civ changes owners, the new owner can look at old messages regarding alliances and such.

A valid point. I'd have to add a lot of new code to support this, but it seems like a bunch of people use this feature on CivStats, so I'll look into adding this.

Incidentally, you do have a feature where the game admin can kick a civ owner to allow a new player to take control of it, correct?

If a player gets kicked out using Pitboss while the uploader tool is running, the player gets converted to an AI. When this happens, the "owner" of the civ is removed. If a human logs in using "Take Over AI", the player gets converted back to human control, and a new player can claim them.

Would you rather have a kick button on the website itself? Is using the "Take Over AI" mechanism not how you guys handle it, usually? Do you tell the new guy the last guy's password?

 

[Elkad]

If a player gets kicked out using Pitboss while the uploader tool is running, the player gets converted to an AI. When this happens, the "owner" of the civ is removed. If a human logs in using "Take Over AI", the player gets converted back to human control, and a new player can claim them.

Would you rather have a kick button on the website itself? Is using the "Take Over AI" mechanism not how you guys handle it, usually? Do you tell the new guy the last guy's password?

Hmm. Automatic seems kinda nice. Has some issues though, that aren't really your fault. Currently the only way to change your game password in Pitboss is to retire to AI and then reclaim the civ and put in a new password (using the ingame menu doesn't actually work). Which would mean you'd have to re-register with your site as well. Any possibility the server could allow a civ to be AI for, say, 10 minutes?, before kicking the player off?

Your method would work for a "lost player", as the admin would have to kick him. But many games do have good handoffs, where the player finds his own replacement and just tells him the password. We'd hope he'd remember to remove himself from playyourturn at the same time, but it doesn't always happen. And we can't nag at him, cause he's rushed off on a 9week cruise honeymoon or something.

 

[Inverse Icarus]

I'll add a kick option to the "Manage Players" admin page, to allow an admin to set a player back to unplayed.

Adding a delay to the auto-kick would prove difficult, but would not be impossible. I'll look into that later on, as it doesn't appear to be a site-breaking issue.

Keep the suggestions and feature requests coming, though!

 

[Inverse Icarus]

Kick button added to the "Manage Players" page, as described previously.

 

[Inverse Icarus]

New uploader version released, 0.06, which should fix a lot of the "Array Out of Bounds" errors that some people were seeing.

This version also introduces logging, which can be enabled by going to File > Enable Logging. If you can reproduce an error, please turn on logging and send me the log file created! It's very helpful. If you're running fine without errors, I'd advise turning off logging, because the log files can get pretty big.

 

[-Zulan-]

I'm very happy to see that project! Thumbs up! I would like to suggest some improvements:

- While I generally like the idea of colored events, they look quite confusing due to the many differnet colors and sometimes hard to read due to the lack of contrast of background and text.

- The score change does not show if it decreases or increases. This is very important due to slavery / city founding. I would also suggest to display the change of score (e.g. Score increased to 123 (+5)). Maybe a little icon would look good ( / / / *)

- Right now the event list seems dead, but I assume you are aware of this (You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1)


* I craeted those, so incase you want to use them feel free to.

 

[Inverse Icarus]

- While I generally like the idea of colored events, they look quite confusing due to the many differnet colors and sometimes hard to read due to the lack of contrast of background and text.

As mentioned, I am a terrible designer. Which color combinations are most offensive? I assume the "white on light colors" for login/logout are the main culprits.

If you have any alternative color schemes to propose, or just general suggestions, I'd be all for entertaining them.

- The score change does not show if it decreases or increases. This is very important due to slavery / city founding. I would also suggest to display the change of score (e.g. Score increased to 123 (+5)). Maybe a little icon would look good ( / / / *)

Yes, this is currently a limitation of the design, but I have had a request to add this by several people now. I will work on something to allow this in the near future.

- Right now the event list seems dead, but I assume you are aware of this (You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1)

I am not aware of this, and cannot find what you're talking about. Do you mean in the list in the "View Game" page, or in the explicit "View Game Events" page?

http://www.playyourturn.com/?page_id=37&gameID=1

Do you see events there?

It's possible that you checked at a time while I was making changes to the live server, but that doesn't seem likely.

If you still see the issue, give me as many details as you can, and I'll look into it.



Thanks for checking out the site! The Uploader Tool has come a long way in the past month, and is now fairly stable. The site is getting more and more features every day, and bug reports are being addressed!

As noted in a blog post on the site, I will be going home to NY for Christmas, and will likely not have a lot of time to work on the site for the next two weeks. But keep the testing going and the bug reports / feature requests coming!

 

[Inverse Icarus]

I am not aware of this, and cannot find what you're talking about.

I found it.

This issue only happened when you weren't logged in, and it's fixed now.

Thanks!

 

[-Zulan-]

As mentioned, I am a terrible designer. Which color combinations are most offensive? I assume the "white on light colors" for login/logout are the main culprits.

If you have any alternative color schemes to propose, or just general suggestions, I'd be all for entertaining them.

The gray text on green background (login) is the hardest to read.

By using green and red you are putting the highlight on the login/logout events. I might be accustomed to civstats alot, but I am not really interested in logins / logouts that much as I am in score changes or new turn. I would suggest to use a gray combination and maybe add an icon for visual support (link / link_break of silk icons should do it).

The new turn and finished tur are important and thus I would keep them as is, maybe you could play a bit with the icon margin/padding to make sure each row has the same height.

But thats all just a matter of taste and suggestions from my part

One more thing: I do not see the time left of a turn on a game page?

 

[Inverse Icarus]

One more thing: I do not see the time left of a turn on a game page?

I'm working on this. Believe it or not, I've always played with a small group of friends and have never used a turn timer!

The uploader tool does send the turn timer to the website, I just have to write some code to handle it and display it nicely.

The primary focus of the past two weeks has been getting the Uploader Tool stable and working. Now that it's in a good state, I can focus on more-involved feature development for the site. The turn timer is on the top of my list

 

[Inverse Icarus]

Just checking in to announce that a major update to the Uploader Tool has been released today, version 1.00! We're officially out of beta, and the tool has been enhanced in many ways. Many bugs have been fixed, and new features have been added.

I've still got a list of things to do, but with a solid feature-filled uploader tool now complete, I am now free to work on enhancing the website itself.

If you are running a game, please update to the newest version! It will provide a more stable experience, and has better event logging.

 

[JOY_Man_Toto]

I tested witch linux and Wine.

it not work : I have error line 1 when I selected Pboss.exe

 

[Inverse Icarus]

Joy Man Toto: I posted a response to your comment on the blog, but I see you're here and I think the discussion would happen better on CF.

What is the error exactly? Is there a more descriptive output message?

And you say you're getting it when you select the Pitboss.exe file? What's the path look like on your system?

I'm not very familiar with Wine, but the Uploader Tool is written in AutoIt, and uses a lot of Windows-specific window handle / path code. I'm not sure how Wine handles all of it.

 

[Inverse Icarus]

There have been many updates to the PlayYourTurn site and Uploader Tool in the past few weeks.

The Uploader Tool is now completely stable. Many people have been running them for weeks now without a single crash. It's also been enhanced to send more information to the server, for better data in the events.

I've enhanced several areas of the site, both functionally and graphically.

I'm also working on the diplomacy feature, which will be better than the one on Civstats.

If you haven't stopped by in a while, check it out again.