I’ve got Auto-synch on joining a room working for 3.2. Pretty straightforward. Joining player sees message ‘Waiting for Game Info…’ followed by ‘Synchronization complete’. Takes about a second to complete. The Synch is done with the room owner (1st player in room) who see the standard ‘Sending game info…’ message.
It’s working for the standard Vassal server/client, I’ll add it to the Jabber client when I see a working server to play with.
Do we still need the ‘Synchonize’ menu option? Perhaps renamed as ‘Re-Synchronize’? Do games lose Sync? (I don’t play through the server much)
I’ve got Auto-synch on joining a room working for 3.2. Pretty straightforward. Joining player sees message ‘Waiting for Game Info…’ followed by ‘Synchronization complete’. Takes about a second to complete. The Synch is done with the room owner (1st player in room) who see the standard ‘Sending game info…’ message.
It’s working for the standard Vassal server/client, I’ll add it to the Jabber client when I see a working server to play with.
Do we still need the ‘Synchonize’ menu option? Perhaps renamed as ‘Re-Synchronize’? Do games lose Sync? (I don’t play through the server much)
You’ll have a working Jabber server to try as soon as I have time to get
it set up on the new machine. Could be this weekend. (I’ve been trying to
get to this for three weekends consecutively now…)
I’ve never had a game lose sync myself, but I’ve read occasional complaints
about it. I speculate that it can happen if your connection goes down and
you miss moves, but it’s not down long enough that the server kicks you out
of the room.
I agree that “Re-synchronize” is a better name for it once we have sync-on-
entry.
Ideally we want players to automatically stay in sync as much as possible.
Starting a new game or closing a game in a room is not communicated to other clients, and no ‘room-level’ action is taken, so there are a couple of ways players can manually de-sync themselves -
A group of players are synchronized in a room. One closes their game and starts a new game.
Perhaps closing the current game should eject you from a named room back to the Main Room? This would force you to rejoin the room, which will cause you to sync with it.
2 players join a room with no game started. Each starts their own new game. This is a regular newbie occurence.
Perhaps you should not be able to join a room where the owning player does not have an active game. ‘Room is not ready’.
Yes. I should also say that I have no idea what the sync characteristics
of the Jabber server will be, having not tried it yet.
Maybe it should be?
Hmm. I think we would not want it to be like this for single-occupant rooms?
Yeah.
Hmm. This sounds counterintuitive to me. The room metaphor seems wrong.
I’m trying to imagine getting together with people from my old boardgaming
club, but having to decide what we’ll play before we enter the room with
the table…
I’m not at all confident about how these situations should behave.
Jabber will still have the problems I have outlines of players manually desyncing themselves.
Would not affect the owner of the room - they can close without getting booted.
Me neither. I have been trying to wrap my head around this for a couple of days, it is a reasonable difficult design problem. These are my ideas so far.
The metaphor in Vassal is that each player has his own copy of the game and sets it up on his own table. If one player moves a counter on his copy of the game, he then shouts to all the other players to move the same counter on their copy.
A new player enters the room, goes to his own table. The ‘owner’ of the room now says ‘set up your copy of the game to match mine’ (Auto-synchronization).
The new player now packs his game up but does not leave the room. (He closes his game). Then he pulls it out and starts setting up a new scenario that is different to all other players. (He starts a new game). He is now out of synch, what should we do?
Perhaps, being in a room should change the File menu items? If you are not the ‘owner’ of the room, then you would no longer have ‘New Game’, or ‘Load Game’ and all scenarios would be disabled. Your only option would be ‘Join Game’. The whole concept of the Rooms is that all players are synchonized and playing the same scenario. It doesn’t make sense to give players the ability to change to a different scenario while remaining in the room. Hence my idea that closing a game forces you back to the Main Room, unless you are the owner.
In the case of of 2 players entering a room with no game started, then only the Room owner would have New and Load Game as normal. When the owner starts a New Game, we force synch all other users in the room.
There is a problem if the room owner closes the game. What happens?
At the moment, we cannot force another player to close a game, or even to resync. Either action causes any current game session of the other player to close, which asks them if they want to save their game. If they click Cancel, then the close action is aborted without closing the game. We would need to change the close behaviour so that a force close issued by a room owner cannot be cancelled.
Before I get too far with new Room dynamics, what is the plan for the main Vassal Server? Is the idea to migrate the main Server to a Jabber based server asap?
It would be nice to move to the Jabber server as soon as we can verify
that it works properly, since then we avoid ever having to pin down the
weirdo problems that the current server has.
That’s what I was hoping we’d do, at least. I’m goint to make an effort
to get a test Jabber server up this weekend.