The Pitboss Session

[Fosse]

This morning I had the pleasure of wasting a dozen people's time and energy by attempting to have them join an hour long play session to kickstart a new Pitboss game. I'm sure many readers here have tried to do similar things. One of the reasons Pitboss is so appealing is the idea that for portions of any game everyone might be online and playing at the same time. This is especially true for the beginning of the game, when turns take four seconds and we'd all like to get to the meaty parts sooner. And while this isn't so difficult to manage for a four or five player game, once you start to get more than that you are almost certainly going to run into problems.

So I wanted to add my experience to the growing list of that accumulated by others who have tried -- successfully or not -- to host play sessions in Pitboss. Many helpful people PMed me with advice and experiences, and much of it came in handy and all of it proved true.

Here are things to know:

No Firewalls.
This isn't a suggestion, it's practicaly a requirement. Turn off your firewall, and make sure you turn off Windows' Firewall, too. Opening ports and making exceptions is all well and good when you are logging onto a server to play one turn, but for the duration of a play session turn it off. If you leave your firewall on and are able to log into the game, then you can be assured that soemone trying to log on after you is going to get a message from the game that your firewall is blocking them.

Claim your Civ
Admins, set up the game a few days early with a 24 hour turn so everyone can log on to claim their civ. Then when the game starts and the play time has come and gone, you can KICK those players who haven't shown up. This is actually what scuttled my attempt this morning... 9/12 players were online and ready, but I couldn't kick an unclaimed Civ. When we had a couple players volunteer to switch Civs and "retire" the ones who never showed up we got bad OOS errors and the multiple logins kept some people out.

So start the game early, and KICk those players who haven't shown up in time. You can send an email to any alternates you have standing by after you kick them out.

Host Goes First
Admins, make sure that you are logged into the game and have your civ open before anybody else does. You should instruct them to not login on the day of the session until after a certain time, by which you'll be on. For some reason it was impossible for me to log into a game I was hosting if others were on. Other admins in my game had also had this problem before. Host logs in first.

...

Thoughts
GameSpy
It might be easiest of all to Broadcast your new game on GameSpy with a password for the duration of the play session. I've never tried this, so I'd love if anyone else could weigh in on this thought. If you broadcast a Pitboss game over the Internet, then people login to it through the Lobby, does this alleviate any problems? After the session you can just save and broadcast by DirectIP later. Thoughts?

NoShows
Someone won't show up. If you aren't willing to KICK players and put in alternates, don't try hosting a session. And if you're a player with a scheduled session and you think you won't make it, email your host and tell him so. It will help out for everyone.


The session could be a great part of many Pitboss games as long as the community learns how to deal with its problems. If the community stays willing to experiment with them and try them out for a while, we might even get to the point where every single attempt at one doesn't turn into a mollybang.

Good luck with sessions, folks. Advice and experience is welcome here!

 

[OverloadUT]

A note about firewalls: Sure, it'll work if everyone can turn off their firewall, but remember that a lot of people use a router to connect their computer to the Internet. A router is an implicit firewall because it simply has no way of knowing where to send incoming trafic unless it's explicitly defined in a port forwarding rule. The only way to "turn off" a router's "firewall" is to define your computer as being in the DMZ - then it should forward all unknown traffic to your computer.

Also keep in mind that doing this is very dangerous anyway. We have firewalls for a reason!

The moral of this story? When you decide to write your own computer game, please remember that the client-server model works and there's no need to implement some peer to peer crap because it just causes all of these problems.

 

[Xerol]

Hamachi works wonders for connectivity issues. In the oob's 2nd game we used it for the accelerated start; the only problem is that it needs to be an all-or-nothing affair (you can't have direct connection and hamachi players online at the same time) but you really only need it for the accelerated start.

As far as bypassing routers/firewalls, it's just completely not possible for certain people, especially in university and other large shared network settings. In these cases something like hamachi is almost a necessity (as I've found out when trying to play other online games that require direct connectivity).

I actually like the idea of starting play early, perhaps even more than 24 hours in advance (maybe even enough time for 3-4 turns) as this will allow at least some connectivity testing to take place (I've had problems making OUTBOUND connections to normally-connectable hosts sometimes) and get people into the game before it really starts. (One of the things I really like about a 24-hour game is the amount of time given to plan/strategise; in the event of an accelerated start, you don't get that much time to plan before you plop down the settler.)

 

[Mutineer]

Xerol, that is not correct. I did not had Hamachi in our accelerated start and everything still works.

 

[Fosse]

Hamachi might be a good answer. I know I didn't choose to use it because I hate asking people to download more stuff to install on their computer. It's not a big deal to me, since I'm already going to the effort of coordinating and administering a game. But I have enough trouble getting all the players to register their leaders at civstats, let alone download more software.

Knowing that it works with IP and Hamachi is good though... maybe just router/university people really need it (and the host).