PBEM server - first beta Online

[Rowlff]

Like discussed in the recent 'PBEM recommendations'-thread, I have been working on a fully automatic PBEM server for 'Dominions II'.
This system, while easy to install (needing only PHP5 and a cronjob), will allow people to host a large number of PBEM games with minimal admin supervision.

It's not done yet (which most of all means, that no games are actually hosted), but I have put a first working beta Online at

http://rowlff.dotgeek.org/domserv/

where you can already set up player accounts, create games, edit and join them, upload .2h files, ...

Please have a go at it, to find the inevitable bugs, give me your ideas, wishes, complaints!

I'll continue the work in the next days - and if I could take Gandalf up on his offer to use his server, we might have a working Version with live games soon (^_^)

-Marc

[Gandalf Parker]

Rowlff said:
This system, while easy to install (needing only PHP5 and a cronjob), will allow people to host a large number of PBEM games with minimal admin supervision.

Only PHP5 and cron? Using comma dilimeted text files for a database? (which would be fine with me)

So this is going to be webbased PbEM? upload/download turm files and scripted "host & quit" cron jobs?

[Rowlff]

I use PHP 5's built in SQLite as a database (which is the reason I didn't go with the more widespread Version 4).
That gives me full SQL capabilities without having to install anything else...

And yes to your other question: The cron job will just have to call a 'runhost' script every hour (or whatever 'granularity' of schedule you prefer), and this automatically determines the games that are due for a host and runs them!

[Gandalf Parker]

It looks really good. Simple. Maybe even simple enough for me to understand the scripts.
PLEASE release it as a base workable Version and THEN start adding neat things.

As for hosting, thinking about getting a domain to go with it?
dommies.com
dominionist
dominionism
dominions2.net
dom2games.net
domgames.net
dom2taw.net
d2games.net

We can always tag it off of dom2minions.com but thats such a long name.

[deccan]

Way to go, that was fast work!

[Rowlff]

Good to hear that you seem to like it - it's still a way to go, when it comes to automatic hosting, though: The fact that there's no standalone server, and you have to more or less start the complete 'Dominions II'-application to do a simple host run, is a big problem.
So far, I haven't been able to do so from a php-script, but I am working on it (^_^)

Once this works (and I'm still confident), we can think about where to put it. And I will then immediately release it for everybody to play around with. Promise!