Civ4 PitBoss Available

[IglooDame]

The time lag is unrelated to your hardware, it is a software issue, and your ratio sounds about right.

I've got 17-player games running on Celeron-500s, if you're running into problems on restoring saves it probably has nothing to do with the size of the game or number of players/civs.

There's a 32-player pitboss game (warlord, unpatched) going on, too, but I'm not sure what hardware that is running on.

 

[chasbolt]

Hi Thunderfall,
Fine instructions. just as you said. Thank you.

 

[HakTom]

hi!

me and some friends of mine switched one of our PBEM Games to a simultaneous pitboss game.
we are using the pitboss download from this thread, not the warlords one.

we are having serious ingame-problems:

• No Diplomacy! : Diplomacy only works, when the correspondig players are both online. every request to an offline player never reaches is receipient.
• no city popups whenever something finished in one of our cities.
• unit cycling is different to the normal game, you have to cyle using the "enter" key
• pitboss server UI crashes, when i touch the scrollbar. but the game is still going on

are these problems already public? are there any fixes for them?

thanks in advance

 

[ForesterSOF]

From what you said I would guess that you changed from version/type x PBEM to version/type y PB.

 

[HakTom]

yeah, thats right!

should i revert it to PBEM type? would this work with a simultanious PB game?

thanks
cheers

 

[quix0te]

Okay. I would like to be able to set up Pitboss on my computer, with a couple of special cases:
First, I'd like to have a hybrid PBEM/Real time game, where one night a week we play in real time, so we can do a bunch of turns quickly, and the rest of the week we do turns every twelve hours. Is this doable?
Second, I use yahoomail as my primary mail, so I dont have SMTP settings on my computer. Can Pittboss work around that? I could probably configure the cable company's default SMTP settings if I could find them, but it would be easier if I could just configure Pitboss to use yahoomail.

Also, if players dont turn in their moves for two or three turns, how long will their previous commands have 'inertia'? Will the computer AI start countermanding their build queues and movement commands as soon as they dont put in a turn?

Thanks for any help and advice.

 

[ForesterSOF]

1. Yes.
2. I think it would be OK. jThe PB emails to where each user tells it to in their options.
3. Yes; no problem and can have each unit etc with a list of enough to keep it bussy for 3 turns.

 

[Jangster]

Our pitboss game with FfH-mod, standard map and 7 players does not change turns every 24hours it seems like EVERY player has 24 hours to make their turn even though I have simultaneous turns turned on. Is there an in-depth manual for pitboss anywhere? I also have AI takeover on and we still have 3 AI's left in our game, but no one pick them because they are not visible in the select civilization screen. Anyone having similar problems?

and third does the saveconverter work on FfH-mod also, when I use it it just shuts down after the first question.

thanks everyone

 

[Jangster]

Well I figured out that there is 4 nonplayable civs in FfH mod, so that was the problem.

But the real problem is that even with simultaneous moves the turn timer will reset everytime when player who's turn it is presses end turn. so basicly one turn could last for a week with 7 players each finishing their turn with one hour left in the turn timer thus resetting the timer.

I would really want to know what is the problem here. I thought the turntimer with simultaneous moves skips to the next turn if players haven't finished their turns in the set time.

Anyone get simultaneous moves working in FfH mod or is the issue same in vanilla games?

 

[MensSana]

After using PitBoss for a while now, and it is at least working, and I think it is a nice idea so that PBEMs do not drag on forever, although there are a number of improvements that I would really like to have in the PitBoss software....

1) That they fix the timelag bug, so that when I say 24 hours, it really runs 24 hours, and not 26. In my current game I am constantly correcting from 19 hours to 20 hours to make it complete the turn more or less during the night.

2) The ability to run several PBEM games with the same software instance, so that you not have to start several pitbosses, like for examples several documents in most programs.

3) Upon running the software why do you have to go through e-mail etc before loading a game. Is not that information in the save file???

Does anyone know if firaxis is going to fix those issues, or do we as a community, construct our own version of pitboss??
For myself I am a pretty accomplished programmer, although I have never programmed anything in Python, but does seem to resemble all the other programming languages I am programming in. But does somebody have any knowledge on how difficult it would be to do your own pitboss software, without all these bugs???

/MensSana

 

[GFletch]

Quick question:

I've been running Pitboss succesfully now for awhile, and I'm on a wireless network. I just switched wireless adapters, which went seamlessly, but now my players cannot connect.

I've checked my ports, and they are still working. My IP address has not changed. I'm trying to figure out why my players now can't connect -- what might have changed when I changed adapters (the router is still the same, just my own wireless connection to it, and hense, Pitboss' connection to it).

I checked, and my internal IP changed by a single digit, so I changed the port forwarding to reflect that. I'm at a loss, again.

Help?

 

[ForesterSOF]

did defaults reset and there is now some sort of firewall up.

 

[emperorosmar]

yes i have a question...is there anyway a pitboss will stay there turned on even if i turn my comp off? lol or do i need a host like a SERVER ...or does the game stays on so that other player can join the game at anytime, even if i turn my computer off??? that means turning the pitboss off too so what do i do it means most of the time my pitboss must be on??? how does this work ...help pls

 

[ForesterSOF]

Your Computer needs to be on and connected for PB to run.

If you want to be able to turn off your comp once and a while then set-up a PB with designated power sessions.

 

[Laurentius]

Thanks for all of you desperately writing bug reports about pitboss server. After months of using and debugging Ive made my conclusion: It is useless piece of software with lagging support and documentation.
If no-one has interest or skills to make it work properly with necessary features, it shouldnt be advertised. If the developers want support in beta testing they should release a beta version of the program. It is unbelievable that we have 15 players who have bought the game for playing purely on pitboss and just cant get it working.
How about converting the whole program to open-source basis? I would like to participate in fixing it.

 

[MensSana]

I agree to some point to Laurentius!
It is full of bugs, and I am very irritated by the software.
Although it is better than standard PBEMs. So the idea of pitboss is nice, but so full of bugs that it is unbelievable that they have not fixed them all yet.

If the program becomes open-source I would be happy to contribute to fixing it so that it works properly.

 

[IglooDame]

hi!

me and some friends of mine switched one of our PBEM Games to a simultaneous pitboss game.
we are using the pitboss download from this thread, not the warlords one.

we are having serious ingame-problems:

• No Diplomacy! : Diplomacy only works, when the correspondig players are both online. every request to an offline player never reaches is receipient.
• no city popups whenever something finished in one of our cities.
• unit cycling is different to the normal game, you have to cyle using the "enter" key
• pitboss server UI crashes, when i touch the scrollbar. but the game is still going on

are these problems already public? are there any fixes for them?

thanks in advance

That I've seen, they're not well known (yet), and I haven't seen any fixes for them (yet). I've got a pitboss game that was custom-created as a PBEM and is experiencing your problems #2 and #3, and I haven't found a solution yet.

 

[taraba]

:-( its kind of bad programming that they can't fix it so that it follows the system clock, instead of lagging.
Anyone that has computed a ratio for how much it lags?
Mine seems to lag about 3:15 hours/24 hours this, as I said before,
on a P3 800Mhz 521 Mbytes RAM
Or is the lagging not linked to the hardware just a bad software?

/MensSana

I think the lag is due to them setting multiple short timers instead of figuring out the end time and counting down to that..... and that's bad programming. Basically, if I set a 1 second timer and then update my countdown and set another 1 second timer, I might actually spend 0.05 seconds (+- random amounts) doing something before I start the next timer and therefore every 1 second is about 1.05 seconds, 1 hour becomes 1 hour and 3-5 minutes, 24 hours becomes 25-26 hours, etc.

The correct way to do it would be to calculate the end time of the turn when you start the turn. Then when you go to update the clock you take your end time and subtract your start time and display the time left. If your time reaches your end time, then you end the turn and do it again. You'll have fractional seconds of creep on each turn that people wouldn't notice. You just have to use a method that doesn't get impacted when the server changes it's system clock time. (DST or someone clicking on the clock in system tray)

 

[GFletch]

Thanks for all of you desperately writing bug reports about pitboss server. After months of using and debugging Ive made my conclusion: It is useless piece of software with lagging support and documentation.
If no-one has interest or skills to make it work properly with necessary features, it shouldnt be advertised. If the developers want support in beta testing they should release a beta version of the program. It is unbelievable that we have 15 players who have bought the game for playing purely on pitboss and just cant get it working.
How about converting the whole program to open-source basis? I would like to participate in fixing it.

It works fine for me. I have had no issues with Pitboss either as a player or a host, that wasn't due to my own error.

As for email notifications/diplomacy issues, those were resolved by the VERY helpful CivStats site and uploader.

It is FAR from a useless program. Considering Firaxis didn't have to include it to begin with, I for one am happy they did.

 

[MensSana]

Well GFetch, I agree to some point.
They did not have to include it, and I for one also am glad that they did include it, making PBEM a much more playable game. Although now that they include it I can see a number of improvements they could have done, and also some serious bugs. So pitboss has a very nice idea, but should be developed a lot better.
By releasing pitboss they opened a pandoras box, because now we now that it is possible....