Re: got access to a linux server?

Gandalf Parker wrote:
I know of VGAP. In fact I have a pre-order for VGAP4 from 2001 :)
Its another on my "eagerly awaiting list (as soon as there is a full
install with AI I will accept it and register it).

Hmmm. There is a big schism between v3 and v4, and I have to hold my
hand up at this point and say I've never tried v4. It's a much much
more complicated game, and it might be great, but if you want complex
you have SEIV! v3 is more simple and elegant (yeah yeah, like Stars).

Does VGAP actually host on linux? Or is it capable inside some sort of
windows emulator like wine?

v3 has a complete reverse-engineered host replacement, called Phost
(www.phost.de). So you can run an entire game, including the initial
universe setup, on a linux box, without needing any emulators. You need
DosBox or similar if you actually want to *play* your turns on linux,
but stand-alone linux servers are very much alive.

I don't know if there will ever be a linux host for v4 - most of the
original team have moved on, and there doesn't seem the same kind of
interest in v4 from the linux-based VGAP community.

Personally I don't see the need for scripts to generate dynamic web
pages, when you can do almost all of it by email.

Some people are leary of playing by email. They would rather have a way
to download (not hard at all) and upload their turns (abit more
problematic with some security concerns).

IME it's the other way round. People are familiar with sending and
receiving emails, but leery of downloading from web sites.
YMobviouslyVs.

As far as full PbEm play by email, I had another concept in mind where I
would create each game on the server as a user. So if they called it
"Glory" then would create a glory user. That would give it a webspace,
file space, and an email address. The turns could be sent to glory@ and
procmail could process it into the game directory. Each delivery could
kick off a script that checks to see if all are in and then run host.
Then glory@ could email out the turn files after hosting. All very
capable of full automation. It also would provide an FTP directory which
could be controlled seperately from other users on the machine. The game
maker could be allowed limited priveleges to manage the web pages and
such. And the email arrangment makes for automatic simple backups of
previous turns.

The scripts I linked in my previous post already do almost all of that
- automated receiving and verifying of turns, running host when all
turns are in or at scheduled times via cron, sending out result files
to players, maintaining backups, etc. They also do a lot more, like
managing signon and resignation, requests for re-sending results,
sending config files/rules/help, etc.

Instead of creating a new user for each game (which has its own
security implications), the procmail script parses message subjects for
VGAP, and the second argument in the subject is always the game name,
the third is the player number and the fourth is the command eg.

VGAP glory 6 trn
VGAP glory 5 resign

etc. The only thing the scripts don't do is create the blog for each
game, but that's a one-off which can be done in the setup script. Like
I said earlier, I haven't yet decided whether and how to implement
setting up a new game remotely - the scripts originally envisaged the
host working on the local system configuring and setting up the game,
and only the players doing stuff remotely.

- the sending and receiving of files is much better done by
email.

With Dom its not. Dom is capable of PbEM but its not the easiest. The Dom
client can connect to the host machine for turn transfers. So that part
of the game is easily done. But I dont like having GUI stuff bogging down
my servers so I hated having to have Xwindows or something like it to
bring up the game in gui mode to start the game or handle hosting. Im

As you know, the GUI is no longer needed at all to host Dom2 on a linux
box, so that's good. I agree with you that transferring turns directly
is easier than sending and parsing emails, but my point was that the
procmail script is already written - all you have to do is change
"VGAP" to "DOM2" and it would work! That would remove irritations about
real-time connections (eg. my ISP has frequent short outages, which
would mess up direct connections but have no impact on emails).

fairly happy with the changes to Dom2 to support text-mode management,
and I know you will appreciate all of the options that have been added to
Dom3.

I just want to be able to do on the command line everything that you
can do in the GUI. No more, no less.

Actually Im leary of a starter page also. I suspect that many games would
be created which are never played. At the moment I have scripts which
[snip]
It seems better to always have a certain number of games being offered
but make sure I dont overload my server which does serve other purposes.
With Dom the games can last so long that I might get in the habit of
starting one game a month.

VGAP games can also take many months. You've given me an idea though -
instead of allowing any old Tom, *** or Harry to create a game, you
could write a script to create a game *after* all the players had
signed up! eg.

VGAP glory 0 setup

to send config files for new game but does not start it - when all the
races configured have been taken, then the script automatically
generates the game and sends out the first turn's files to all players.
Neat! I like that.

What I still need to do is work on some cleanup scripts. Check to see
what games are not getting use then delete them and all the files.

Yes, this is a good point.

I do hope Dom3 has FULL command-line functionality, instead of the
crippled version in Dom2 (eg. you cannot specify on the command line
whether the score graphs are on or off, along with one or two other
settings).

Its got a ton more and Johan is pretty willing to consider new ones. The
thing that seems to be hard is not the input lines, but the output. Id
like to see the host put more info OUT into files.

Yes, that's another good point.

Cheers,

CC

.