Re: [pbmserv-dev] just want to bounce this off you all...

[John Williams <williams@morinda.com>]

On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Douglas Zander wrote:

> Thanks John for your feedback.
> I still have difficulty understanding all of the core modules, that is
> why I did not think of installing it as a regular feature for *all*
> games by placing it into games.cpp; I do not know what side-effects it
> would have with everything else.

Your caution is merited, since there are a lot of side effects.
You are probably safe if you only create games via Challenge().
If you develope and test it as an UnknownCommand without doing
game-specific things, it will be pretty easy to move it into game.cpp
later.

> I think I would make it as simple as possible and just take one name at
> a time and provide a way to add your own name several times to the list.
> Then when it picks out players it will just pick out unique players' names.
> I do believe that I would need a way to make it known whether you want
> x-player games with some value of x.
> <gametype> Waitlist <yourid> <password> <number of players requested>
>
> then in the game files there would be a file "waitlist.data" with
> dzander:4
> dzander:2
> dzander:4
> other:4
> ...

You could include the parms list there too, so I can do
"chinesecheckers waitlist -long sharkey pass 6".  Just document that there
is no way to do "or" or "not" logic to parameters.  Exact matches only.

sharkey:6:-long

> BTW: I wish to say that I am looking over the core modules and I figured
> out a way to read the input file and use it for move command storage (like
> what Risque does where the commands are in the body of the email).
> Hopefully, I'll be able to write a game that requires a lot of commands placed
> in the body of the email and I'll be able to do this without writing it in
> perl!  :-)   (it'll be easier for me)

Look at Stratego.  It does that for the initial deployment.  (Just ignore
all the weird non-sequential move stuff.)

~ John Williams