Pitboss WebStats Proof of Concept - Curious About Interest

[OverloadUT]

Well, first change your Script Location to http://www.civstats.com/pbupload.php and see if that works. When I manually entered the URL it worked fine, so I think that'll do it.

Future versions of the Uploader won't even have the Script Location option, as I've decided to do all the hosting myself and you'd never need to change it!

 

[Fosse]

Okay, I got my leader registered, so I have seen the diplomacy section. Thanks. I have to say, it looks pretty great. From the features you've talked about implementing, my own brief time as an admin for a Pitboss game and a player for another, and my imagination I've come up with a list of suggestions. I'm not sure how possible they all are, and I have to say that the service was already amazing yesterday with just an RSS feed, but maybe these will spark something for you.


* Group Diplomacy, and Public postings. If the recipients of a diplomatic message were listed as check boxes, instead of a pull down menu, we could send a message to several people at once. Incoming messages could indicate everyone who received a message, so we'd always know who's involved in which diplomacy. A checkbox for "All" would post the message to everyone.

* Is it possible to limit diplomacy to just civs that the player has met? You seem able to extract data from the game, so this may be possible. This is mostly a "house rule" kind of thing that I bring from SMAC PBEM... nobody can discuss the game without contact. It works on the honor system really, but if you implemented it it would allow a message to "ALL" players to filter out those that would, according to the rules, not be able to get it.

* A scheduling service. What I imagine here is that players could see a calendar where they could input times that they could get online to play. When all the players have a block of time that coincides for 30 minutes, an email is sent out alerting everyone of a possible play time, and a message on the game's page appears saying the same. Alerts could also go out when, say, 80% of the players could do a particular time so that the others could check their schedule. This would alleviate the need to handle this business over messaging programs or email, where in my experience it is very inefficient. Massive group emails only work when people are highly organized, and random groups of gamers don't always tend to be.

* Out of Town flag. If a player won't be able to play for a few days, he can tell Civstats, and a message on the main gamestats page would inform everyone of that.

* Hold up notifiers. Sometimes everyone has played excpet for ONE PERSON, maybe 2 in a big game, and there are 18 hours to go. If I am ever that person I wouldn't mind an email telling me so, since I might be able to squeeze in the turn before work, instead of getting home from work like I usually do. Of course, some would hate the nagging, so if it was an option that'd be better.



Am I right that all communication between Civ and your program is only one way?

 

[OverloadUT]

Thanks for the suggestions!

* Group Diplomacy, and Public postings. If the recipients of a diplomatic message were listed as check boxes, instead of a pull down menu, we could send a message to several people at once. Incoming messages could indicate everyone who received a message, so we'd always know who's involved in which diplomacy. A checkbox for "All" would post the message to everyone.

Hm, my players have requested the same thing, so perhaps I will do this. It will require a bit of a rework, but I think it would be very useful. I've also been contemplating changing the system around to be a "threaded" type of system. Perhaps the messages should look more like the "chat" type system you see in game? I could do that... I think I will draft out some ideas and then ask for feedback.

* Is it possible to limit diplomacy to just civs that the player has met? You seem able to extract data from the game, so this may be possible. This is mostly a "house rule" kind of thing that I bring from SMAC PBEM... nobody can discuss the game without contact. It works on the honor system really, but if you implemented it it would allow a message to "ALL" players to filter out those that would, according to the rules, not be able to get it.

This is something I plan on. If you notice however, every time I talk about extracting data from the game, I talk about it as a plan in the future. This is because I can't extract data from the game yet. To do this, I will need to write an actual Civ 4 mod that the Pitboss game will need to be running. I really wish there was another way (outside of trying to read the memory, which is prone to way too many errors) but I can't figure out any.

* A scheduling service.

It's an interesting idea. My own group never does this so I hadn't thought of it. I'll put it on my "distant future possibilities" list.

* Out of Town flag. If a player won't be able to play for a few days, he can tell Civstats, and a message on the main gamestats page would inform everyone of that.
* Hold up notifiers. Sometimes everyone has played excpet for ONE PERSON, maybe 2 in a big game, and there are 18 hours to go. If I am ever that person I wouldn't mind an email telling me so, since I might be able to squeeze in the turn before work, instead of getting home from work like I usually do. Of course, some would hate the nagging, so if it was an option that'd be better.

The out of town flag is a great idea. I will add that to the design doc.
I do plan on having some sort of hold-up notification as an option.

Am I right that all communication between Civ and your program is only one way?

Right now, yes. However, it would not be hard to add communication going the other way. Actually, it kind of is two way already, because the uploader reads the return value from the upload php script to make sure everything is okay. I've been toying with the idea of some remote-administration features like being able to kick a player out of the game from the WebStats, or perhaps even be able to cycle the whole server in case there are connectivity problems. This is one of those things that I don't need because I use Remote Desktop, but I think a lot of people would like it.

 

[Fosse]

Thanks for the suggestions!

Thanks for listening.

I've also been contemplating changing the system around to be a "threaded" type of system. Perhaps the messages should look more like the "chat" type system you see in game? I could do that... I think I will draft out some ideas and then ask for feedback.

I haven't seen it in action yet (my game isn't even at 3000 BC yet), but here's my thought: If all diplomacy is laid out in chronological order, if it's threaded or seperated into incoming and outgoing, it could quickly get cluttered, with lots of issues being spliced in amongst one another. These are games when people have ten minutes to play a turn and 24 hours to conduct diplomacy in between, after all! Perhaps players can add a subject to each message, and the website can display the list of subjects. So your screen might look like:

Sino-Roman Border
War of 100 AD - Peace talks
Trade Deals
Let's Attack Cathy

Then clicking on any topic will bring you to the threaded display of those messages. If players were diligent about using this system it could be a powerful and well oganized tool.

 

[OverloadUT]

That's basically what I was thinking:

You could start a new "discussion" (is that a good word to use?) with however many civs you wanted, and inside that discussion it would read like a diplomacy window does in game (maybe it would look slightly more forumy, but it'd basically be a glorified chat box.) Each discussion in the index would only be one item, which would list the subject. The "new message" icon would show up if there are new messages in that discussion since you last read it.

For simplicity, if you wanted to "add" someone to a discussion, you would need to start a new discussion with them included. I wouldn't want to have to create a whole interface for having everyone agree to let someone join a discussion.

 

[Whomp]

This is a really awesome tool. We have a 18 (now 14 ) person game that this would be very helpful for. I've posted this to our thread.

18 person pitboss game

 

[the oob]

OverloadUT: Could you change my password for my games? I can't remember what I put

If you're able to do this I'll send you the new passwords by PM.

 

[OverloadUT]

Your games seem to still be connected to the uploaders. Are you talking about the upload password or the player registration password? If it's the latter, then there's no way to currently set it, but I can do it manually in the database if you PM me the password you would like it to be.

 

[MooManof_]

As I said before, I'm willing to help clean up (and secure) your code as well as help implement the new features. I have experience with PHP, particularly database operations and user control.

BTW, copy/pasting passwords is pretty stupid, even when they're encrypted. a much safer method would be to use encrypted session variables.
Also you should never let a user send you a password for manual entry (nor should that even be possible). The best thing to do would be to make the system autogenerate a new password, or failing that, you set it to an arbitary value, and the user changes it when they login. That way you don't learn people's passwords.
I can also help setup an autogeneration system, if you like.

 

[IglooDame]

Well, first change your Script Location to http://www.civstats.com/pbupload.php and see if that works. When I manually entered the URL it worked fine, so I think that'll do it.

Future versions of the Uploader won't even have the Script Location option, as I've decided to do all the hosting myself and you'd never need to change it!

It works with the new script location, thanks!!

 

[OverloadUT]

As I said before, I'm willing to help clean up (and secure) your code as well as help implement the new features. I have experience with PHP, particularly database operations and user control.

BTW, copy/pasting passwords is pretty stupid, even when they're encrypted. a much safer method would be to use encrypted session variables.
Also you should never let a user send you a password for manual entry (nor should that even be possible). The best thing to do would be to make the system autogenerate a new password, or failing that, you set it to an arbitary value, and the user changes it when they login. That way you don't learn people's passwords.
I can also help setup an autogeneration system, if you like.

Heh, I understand all that. All I did was copy the md5 string from one field in the database (the user's password) and pasted it in to another field (the player registration) - I did this because the website is incomplete and doesn't have the features to change that password, so there's no way I would already have a random password generator implemented. I think you're overreacting a bit! There's no way I can "learn" a player's password by looking at an md5 string.

Anyway, thanks for the offer. For now I'm fine working alone but I may ask for help in the future. I do have one question for you, and I'm sure the answer is simple but I haven't found it in the php docs: How can I call another php script to execute in the background. For example, I want to call a bunch of mail() functions for the turn notification, but I don't want the script that does this to wait for those functions to finish before ending the script. I want to be able to just fire off a, for example, mail.php script and not worry about what the return values are from the mail() calls. I know I can use exec(), but I figure there has to be a cleaner way. I mean, when you post to one of these forums, it emails all the people that have "subscribed" to the thread, but the page doesn't take a long time to load while it's waiting for the mail to send.

 

[HitAnyKey]

I've noticed a little oddity so far in that the site seems to record turns being Finished when they really aren't being finished. Whether this happens due to name changes and repeated logins and logouts I'm not sure. But it's certainly and oddity. You'll see it appears to happen quite often in our Realpolitik game.
Also, the name changing is going through weirdly as well but that's obviously something related to the fact that we're running the game with a Mod.

The constant name changes is because it's being played as teams, with like 4-6 people on each team all logging in as the same Civ.


EDIT: Just as an example I'm going to post the results of the Finished Turn oddity for my team only:
6/21/06 9:14 pm A new turn has begun. It is now 1000 BC
6/21/06 9:14 pm MOD* HitAnyKey Finished turn
6/22/06 3:29 am HitAnyKey Finished turn
6/22/06 5:18 am MOD* Corossol Finished turn
6/22/06 9:22 am Corossol Finished turn
6/22/06 2:13 pm MOD* Rince Finished turn

At no point during any of the above was the turn actually Finished. The Red Button (and hence the ending of the turn) wasn't actually done until I logged in and did so after my login at 5:13pm. And that one didn't even register the Finished Turn action.

Any idea why?

 

[OverloadUT]

Ahhh, I know exactly what it is. For some reason several people on your game are using names like "*MOD* HitAnyKey". The way the uploader can tell when someone has finished with theit turn is that the admin panel puts an asterisk at the beginning of someone's name when their turn has finished. But because you logged in with a name that starts with an asterisk anyway, it thinks that you finished your turn just then. And that's also why it shows your name as "MOD* HitAnyKey" until your turn is actually finished, then it goes back to showing the asterisk in the beginning.

The point of all this rambling is... uh... Do you know why your names have *MOD* at the beginning of them? Is that something you as players are adding manually, or is that a side effect of the mod you are running. If it's the latter, what mod is it? I'll take a look.

The bottom line is I could add specific support for checking for the "*MOD*" paradigm, but I would like to know WHY that's there before I do.

 

[HitAnyKey]

I know we definately aren't putting the MOD stuff in our names when we log in, and those don't show up in the names In-Game. So it's definately something in the translation behind the scenes through the uploader.
As for the details of the MOD itself, you got me on that as I don't know anything about Mods. I'll get Great Scott's attention and have him tell you about the Mod that's being used.

 

[IglooDame]

We're not actually using any mods in the Civivor game, but one player that apparently has a problem with his Civ4 installation shows up with a MOD in his playername automatically. Maybe there's a way to automatically parse names for "MOD*" and remove that 4-character string from them, as far as Civstats is concerned?

 

[OverloadUT]

Ah, okay. The fact that it happens to people not running a mod on the server is good news.

My guess is this: The Pitboss server application puts "*MOD*" at the beginning of players name when it detects that a client is using modified assets on his client, and the "Lock Modified Assets" option is not turned on serverside. It serves as a warning to the administrator that a player could be trying to cheat.

I'll add in specific support to strip the "*MOD*" from people's names.

 

[IglooDame]

Ah, okay. The fact that it happens to people not running a mod on the server is good news.

My guess is this: The Pitboss server application puts "*MOD*" at the beginning of players name when it detects that a client is using modified assets on his client, and the "Lock Modified Assets" option is not turned on serverside. It serves as a warning to the administrator that a player could be trying to cheat.

I'll add in specific support to strip the "*MOD*" from people's names.

That is exactly my guess as well.

And just a quick thought, you up to putting the downloadable exec on the civstats website itself?

 

[Fosse]

Will there be an option to delete games? I'm starting to feel guilty for that TEST one that's sitting in the middle of your screen.

 

[MooManof_]

The *MOD* aspect is when Civ4 (the game or PitBoss) detects that some files are different from that of the host... this can be as little as changing a single file, then changing it back. The different 'last modified' date is what triggers the *MOD* tag. Often nothing at all is wrong, and I believe the Blue Marble terrain pack may be a trigger.
One thing to note, though; if you set the option 'Lock Modified Assets' (the new name for 'Disable Cheats'), anyone who triggers *MOD* will NOT be able to connect. It's that simple.

 

[OverloadUT]

Major updates

I have a few things to announce this weekend.

First, I uploaded a new version of the Uploader. Everybody should update to this new version. It now has support for the "*MOD*" in players' names. Please tell me if it works. Also, the interface has been improved - there's now a nifty network activity icon, and the script location is no longer there, as the script location doesn't need to change. Finally, I added a "Auto Detect" button that can be used to automatically fill in the "Game Name" field - it shows a list if detected Pitboss games if it finds more than one.

Second, I mentioned it in passing before, but I registered a domain for this project:
http://www.civstats.com/
Please make sure you're using this location to access the site now. The old location will continue to work for a little while, but the code is not being updated there so you won't see any of the new features.

Which brings me to the new feature! You can now "administrate" games you own, allowing you to set all of the game options as well as set all of the players' leaders and registration passwords. In order to see the options for this, I'll need to manually assign the admins of each of the games, because you guys started uploading your stats before I had the whole "Add a game" feature. So, if you want me to assign you as the admin for your game, please tell me:
The game name that's yours
The username you used to register at www.civstats.com