Frood AACalc Dicey / Sim / Odds Calculator: Updates and Opinions

Ahh… He he, no worries, she has contributed more than her share. I do it for the joy of it, I don’t expect anything, especially from Jennifer who has donated twice now.

No worries - I’m not expecting multiple donations from anybody! only about four people have donated period, so as far as I am concerned those four are good for life. I do this for one reason - because I enjoy it and my ego gets a big stroke from people actually using my tool. That’s it. The donations are nice and are appreciated, but not why I do it.

Yeah, you’re good too, no worries CC.  :mrgreen:

Why is that afro hair smiley called Mr. Green?

Ha ha ha! NPB’s post made me laugh out loud, literally. That’s awesome.

It tickled my funny bone - errr, never mind.

Thanks for the move, djensen.

All right, here are my thoughts for making AACalc into a better PBEM/PBF tool, considering the difficulties that have arisen in certain games.

First, I will add several new fields to the form, which will be optional:

Game ID
Game password
Turn (eg. US1, Ger5, whatever)

Here’s what they’ll do:

Enter a battle as normal, and if you also enter a Game ID (of your own choosing, I recommend something unique) and a password, along with at least 2 validly formulated e-mail addresses in the e-mail field, a game record will be created (or added to if it already exists and you entered the correct password).

This game record will contain, for starters, the e-mail addresses as well as the ruleset and luck model indicated on the form. For future battles it will only be necessary to enter the game ID and password, and results will automatically be sent to the registered e-mail addresses, and the battle will be run using the ruleset and luck model initially chosen. This prevents cheating by selecting Classic to have the defenders tanks defend on 2 instead of 3 - one could catch this but one might also get away with it.

Also if a game # is entered the battle will not run in sim mode, only once.

Finally of course the battle results will be recorded for verification in case of e-mail failure.

A turn name should also be entered if a Game ID is used.

Then I’ll create a new subpage called “Confirm results” or something even catchier, which initially will just show a single field asking for a game ID. Enter the game, and all the recorded turns will be listed. Click on one of the turns, and it will show all the battles rolled under that turn. This page will NOT require a password - the password is merely to prevent others from rolling dice in your game. This prevents the scenario where one player might say “but I never rolled those dice, someone else did.” The password will only be known to the players, while the game ID can be shared so that others can check out your results.

The A&A.org topic # might be a good choice for game ID.

Finally, these new fields would survive the “Clear” button, so that you can leave the Game ID, password and turn label for your entire turn without having to re-enter them.

Also, with this kind of a record, I could conceivably build a tool that would review an entire game and analyze how lucky/unlucky the dice were.

I’m leaning toward numbers only, for security reasons.

I’m wondering if with the Game ID there’d be a way for my dicey to post the results directly to the forum here. How does TripleA do it? I’ll pm tonez…

Well, I haven’t actually done anything yet.  :wink:

Which is maybe good - my idea keeps evolving, so I save a lot of work building it one way and then another etc. I really hope to have some kind of result audit mechanism in place for the 2nd round of the tourney

It’s really not that big of an expansion, in terms of work.

My bid page already creates a (temporary) game record with both player’s e-mail addresses. I just have to add the ruleset to that form, and maybe make bidding optional, and then not erase the record after the bid is complete, and then add to the record with each game turn that gets rolled.

And the dice data is already generated by the dicey, it just has to be saved and the functions to display the results are already built too.

In other news, I am considering removing the tech units (SSub, HBom and JFig), and maybe eventually adding a way to add them back in if desired, but keep the default form simpler with fewer units. That button would also add in NA units, as I create support for them. That may not happen for a while though now, other priorities…

All right, I have done a preliminary piece at http://frood.net/aacalc/makegame/

It’s an enhanced version of my bid page, but the page also lets you declare who will be axis rather than bidding, if you did your bid elsewhere or don’t want to bid. You can also bid negative (to give the Allies $)

Right now it just creates the game record.

The next step is to modify AACalc so you can enter the game ID# and then have your results logged. That should be fairly easy actually. The big question is, do I remove the current e-mail field to keep the form simpler and force people to use the game log? I’m not a big fan of forcing options on people, but I will be posting an announcement that Frood.net will not vouch for PBEM results that are not logged in a game record on my server.

Then the final step will be to build an application for looking up results, prolly also not a biggie.