GOTM Website Is Back Up

[DynamicSpirit]

Hi all, I have some good news for you... The GOTM Website is now able to run Civ5 games again! This means you'll be able to use the website for information about the games, as well as submit your completed games there, and get the results automatically compiled.

The website is also (hopefully) a bit friendlier to use than before. If you go to the home page, you'll see all the games that are currently running. Clicking on any game will take you to the 'release page' for that game, which has links to download the starting save or view the results. There's also a Civ5 bar across the top of every page that contains links to submit a completed game, or view a list of past games, as well as see a map gallery of all past games. I've uploaded all the summer games and the current ones to the server.

What this means for you:

• If you are playing either of the current games (TSG277 and TSG278) you can submit your completed game to the server for inclusion in the results at https://gotm.civfanatics.net/submit/c5-gotm.php (same link as on the GOTM home page). Note you've only got another 8 days to submit for TSG277.
• For the other games that were affected by the server downtime (TSG269 to TSG 276) you won't be able to use that page yourself because those games have already completed, and the website won't normally accept submissions for competitions that are closed. However, if you DM me your save and your email address, I'll get the save uploaded. I also plan to check for saves posted in the 'After Actions' threads and upload those, but if you can DM that will save me a bit of time scouring the threads
• We'll be able to start publishing the outstanding results from the summer games starting in a couple of weeks' time - to allow time for everyone to get their saves to me.
• Going forward all future games should now be able to run on the server, just as was happening before the server went down back in May. Game discussions etc. will still happen here on the forums just as they've always done.

A lot of the site is running newish code, so I'm expecting some teething problems that will need ironing out for the first few months. If you encounter any issues, please let me know, either by posting in this thread or DMing me.

A should say a huge shoutout to @vadalaz in particular and everyone who kept these games going for 7 months without any server support. Doing that is not easy, and that was an amazing effort. I was so impressed to see the games still coming with complete regulartiy out twice a month.

Any questions - just ask in this thread.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

In case anyone is curious what happened:

The website had been becoming increasingly unreliable and was running an extremely old version of PHP (for non-geeks: That's a computer language that lots of websites are written in) which has been unsupported for years. So back in May it was decided (by the people who run the server, not by the GOTM staff - we all got caught by surprise) to move it to a new server, and also upgrade to a newer version of PHP in the process. Unfortunately, that completely broke a lot of the code, and it turned out none of the people who'd written the original code were still around to fix it. To make it worse, the process that analyses the submitted saves to extract all the data necessary to compile results is performed by some programs written in C++, and it turned out those programs needed recompiling to run on the new server, but no-one knew who had the original source code. Tracking that source code down took about a month and involved help from quite a few Civfanatics staff (thanks guys!).

So there's been a long process of a couple of us figuring out how the php code from the old website worked, upgrading it, and so on. Hence why the website has been down for so long. We got it working for Civ4 games a couple of months ago, then Civ3 games a couple of weeks ago. And now finally Civ5 can rejoin the club But the good thing is - it now means we have a much more robust server, as well as a website that is (hopefully) friendlier and easier to use. And there are some more improvements in the pipeline. (Although as noted in my previous post, don't be surprised if various issues occur for a few months as the code beds in).

 

[sebtanic]

Awesome job guys!

Just a suggestion, I had a look at the results tables and it seems it doesn't show the actual turn of the win, only the date. Most of us look at the turn counter more than the dates though. Any chance you could add a "Turn" column to the table?

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Just a suggestion, I had a look at the results tables and it seems it doesn't show the actual turn of the win, only the date. Most of us look at the turn counter more than the dates though. Any chance you could add a "Turn" column to the table?

That's a pretty good idea. I'll have a look into it and see if it's possible to do.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I mentioned in the starting post of this thread that I'd be uploading the games from over the summer so we could publish the results. That process got a bit delayed because it turned out I needed to rewrite parts of the submission system before I could do that (because of the issue that it meant I was putting games into the system after the competition closing dates - the software as previously written wouldn't accept that). However I've now done the rewrite so I should be uploading the games over the next week. This means that, if you played one of the summer 2025 games, you might get an email out of the blue confirming your save. And it means we'll be able to get on with publishing all the outstanding results.

Another consequence is that you may notice the Civ5 submission page (https://gotm.civfanatics.net/game-info/submit.php) now looks slightly different - I've taken the chance to fix up a few other things while I was working on it.