TripleA Changes for PBEM

You and I are in the unique positition that we’ve been testing various alphas.  I have no plans to make the beta backwards-compatible with saved game files from these alphas. 
My latest jar file is built against 0.8.2.1 and should be backwards-compatible with 0.8.2.1 saved game files.
I raised the compatibility issue before with Sean Bridges (triplea maintainer) and he said only iteration releases (ie: 8.0.2.x) need to be compatible, and others usually aren’t.
So, the compatibility issue is a non-issue as far as I’m concerned.

Now that we’re play-testing the auto-post feature, I thought of another enhancement that might be useful.
At the end-of-turn screen there are two buttons: “View Turn Summary” and “Post Turn Summary”.  Viewing it pops up a new window with the text displayed in a text area.  Currently this text is read-only, however, when you post, it just reads the text out of the text area and posts it.  If I made the text writable in the popup window, then you could actually edit the post, and add commentary, etc, before it was posted.  You wouldn’t have all the nice features of the forum editor but it would still be a useful option, I think.  I could also add a “Post” button at the bottom of the Turn Summary window if it has not yet been posted, and a “Revert” button to undo all manual changes.  Perhaps even a “Post” button for convenience, and a “Cancel” button to close the window without saving changes (ie: in case you screw up the text and want to start over).  I also think instead of “View Turn Summary” it should be “Edit Turn Summary” if I make these changes.

sounds great guys. send me an archive anytime. rempel c/o gmail.com

I’ve never posted here before and have just been lurking in the shadows trying to figure out the best way to play my favorite game on-line.  I love the TripleA interface and like the changes that have been recommended here.Â

Is there a way to play Axis and Allies Revised on TripleA?  Some kind of map upgrade that I have not seen? (I see that you can select rules I recognize from revised - i.e., artillery, destroyers, one hit battleships etc…).  If not, when is someone going to make that upgrade?

RJClayton - Thanks for the information.  I can’t believe that I had not found that option.  :)

Ok, I haven’t posted for a week or so… my apologies.  Things were absolutely crazy at work last week, and then my laptop hard drive crashed this weekend with all my triplea source on it :(
I’m sending the drive in for professional data recovery, but in the meantime I’ve managed to extract my code changes from the latest jar file and merge them back into the source.
I’m going to be testing this new merged copy in my current game against rjclayton.  I’m going to defer sending the jar file out to anyone else until I am sure it is ok (the merge was quite complicated).  Sorry Frood… so close and yet so far.

My current thoughts on implementing the edit feature is that it might be easiest to implement each feature at the appropriate step.
So, in edit mode, you could:
  - purchase units for any player at the purchase panel
  - alter ipcs held at the purchase panel
  - move any player’s units into combat during combat movement
  - resolve all players’ combat during combat phase
  - choose to fix the dice and/or casualties during combat phase
  - move any player’s units during non-combat movement
  - place all players’ units at the place panel
The reason to do things this way is that it likely won’t require changes to the underlying game engine.  I think it makes sense anyway for the movement/combat edits.
One thing that is not ideal is having to wait until the placement phase to add units to the board.  This might be a significant enough drawback to warrant changes to the game engine.  Not sure yet.

@tonez:

Wow, that sucked.  I just worked a 16 hour day.
Anyway, froodster inquired on another thread about how he could make his dice server TripleA-friendly.
I’m going to answer in this thread.  Basically, a simple dice server with email capability is all that TripleA wants and needs. 
Here’s a sample request to the old tripleawarclub server that worked great:
/MARTI.php?numdice=5&numsides=6&modroll=No&numroll=1&subject=blah&roller=player1@domain&gm=player2@domain&send=true

The html output that TripleA parses looks like this:

Dice serveryour dice are: 6 3 1 5 6

Nice and simple.
Any variation will do as long as it is generic like this. 
A low-luck option is cool too, as long as it is just a flag.  TripleA doesn’t support Low Luck PBEM yet, but perhaps someday soon.

Try those parameters with a script I’ve just uploaded to http://frood.net/aacalc/triplea/index.php (index.php can be left off) The html output is identical to what you show above except that the head section also includes a title tag around “Dice Server”

The PBEM changes are still in progress, although a little slower than before.  I’m working on some of the edit features currently.  I have added an Enable Edit Mode option to the Game menu, and I now have the actual edit features about half done.  Currently, you can do combat and non-combat with any units on the board (from any player), you can move units around the board without regular movement restrictions, and you can fix the outcome of a battle by choosing casualties without rolling the dice.  I still need to add edit modes for purchase/placement steps, and I still need to figure out how to allow early placement of new units (for instance, in the purchase round), although I think I have an idea of how to do that.
So, it’s almost to the point where you can use triplea to play against a forum player, which is pretty cool.

I haven’t had a chance to try Frood’s new dice server yet, but if it behaves like the tripleawarclub server, then it should be easy to integrate.

rjclayton just posted in our current game (http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=8331.120) that he’d like triplea to prevent non-combat movement during the combat movement phase.

I think the reason it allows it in the game engine currently is because you have to allow n/c for certain units, like carriers, and also it allows you to make intermediate moves territory-by-territory without using waypoints.  I’ve added a post here:

To fix this, I think you’d first need to:

• fix the carrier must-move-with logic to allow combat movements as long as a carrier could be in range (probably need new CarrierTracker.java object)
• also ensure that carriers can’t be “over-booked” during combat movement phase (or is this allowed in the rules?)
• disallow intermediate movements during combat movement phase… force the use of waypoints

Another option is to just have a validation function when you click the “Done” button for combat movement, that validates all the queued moves before moving to the combat phase.
I’m not sure how easy/difficult this would be.

One problem is that the engine sometimes doesn’t always pick correct waypoints (or recognize that a route exists). I’ve tried to declare combat moves and been told “You can’t move there”, but I can do it moving one territory at a  time. So sometimes you need non-combat moves to successfully make your combat moves.

@froodster:

So when you say “fix the battle outcome” I imagine a screen similar to the “purchase units” or “move units” dialogs where you can simply adjust the units of each side, maybe with one master button for each side that would set all units to 0 for that side.

Actually, it could be accomplished simply by skipping the dice, and then removing the limitation in the casualty screen that you have to match the number of casualties (or by allowing the player to specify the total number of casualties) and then you just take as many casualties from each side as necessary to reach the final outcome indicated by the dicey. Then you end the battle as normal.

Hey Frood, this is exactly what I’ve done now, and it works great.

Sweet. Love to get my hands on a zip file!