PbF/PbEM Changes - Your opinion counts

[RoiEX]

@CrazyIvan
This Thread was mainly focused on client side changes to PbF/PbEM, not changes to the whole system in general, but I'll try to respond to your ideas anyways.

Note that the biggest Problem for most of your suggestions is probably that it's not worth the time for us. See, we're currently 4 Developers with write access to the repository, 2 of which are currently not available for coding tasks and I myself currently don't have a lot of free time either, except for the weekends. So it's important to keep that in mind and the fact that we don't get paid for this in case the answers are somewhat disappointing.

1. Well I don't really see the benefit of making clear which game a certain thread is about. As far as I can tell players usually start a game with someone else (or more people) and then those players know which game the Thread is about. The Thread isn't really interesting for other people either, except maybe if you want to analyze certain strategies or something.
2. While the stats would be nice to have, I don't think enough players are using this feature to create meaningful ones. Also there's the Problem of determining if a game is still in progress, the forums is unable to track that. However if someone with the necessary skills wants to code a NodeBB Plugin for this, I'd be happy to install it, but I currently don't have the resources to create something in that regard.
3. It wasn't a joke, but it wasn't a realistic thing either. We simply don't have the money to pay someone else to do it, and don't have the time to do it on our own. The Forum here is probably the closest thing to a helpdesk we can afford.
4. I mean we don't have any rules forbidding that someone of the community offers such a service, but ideally the whole process would be more or less self-explanatory, but this isn't an easy thing to do either.
5. See 4.
6. Maybe not for PbF/PbEM as it's hard to track those games because they're more or less offline, but for lobby gameplay this is a thing for the future. The main Problem we have is that the current state of the engine is not really extensible in a backwards-compatible way. There are some efforts by @LaFayette to redo a lot of the networking code for the lobby that would allow us to implement such features faster but as long as this isn't a production-ready system it would be fairly time-consuming to implement such a feature.
7. Lobby-Feature, see 6.
8. Yeah, you're probably right about that. Sometimes it's frustrating that we are so few people actively developing TripleA, because so many people have really good suggestions that are just not feasible for us to implement in a reasonable amount of time because the codebase didn't age too well (Originally created almost 19 years ago). Volunteers for such things are always welcome, so in case you wan't to teach yourself Java and start experimenting with the engine on your own and implement all your dreamfeatures yourself there's nothing stopping you from our side

[Raville]

@RoiEX When system ask email to set a game also asked our password that its supposed to be secret, so how can I trust the engine or system to confide my password? Somebody can use my password for hackjing or do something? Before in the old system just our email was enough to game, but since last changes this little detail (that really is a very big one!) make my game out of this PBEM system. Please review about that detail and go back to the secure old system about emails and passwords (that weren't needed then). thanks

[RoiEX]

@Raville
You shouldn't trust some random application to handle your password, however because triplea is open source you could check the source code on your own and notice that we don't use the passwords for anything else than authentication.
And if your email provider requires a password we can't just simply not require one and expect it to work, so I don't really get your point.

[Raville]

@RoiEX Thanking you for answering, what I mean is that when PBEM menu asked to play by email when login it requires to write your email and password, in the before or old system it didn't! I don't think its correct to give your personal password to any system at all. That's what I mean. Why don´t keep the old PBEM system in that sense (just our email, NOT our email password). Did you get my point? Thanks and cheers.

[RoiEX]

@Raville
I get what you're asking for, but I don't think there exists an old version not requiring a password, at least for the 3 years since I joined the project.

[redrum]

@Raville As @RoiEX mentions, TripleA has always required a password for PBEM. Without a password, TripleA wouldn't have any way to be able to send emails from the email account that you specify.

[Raville]

@redrum so sorry, any email can be send and go into any mail box, they don't need password to go in. Same should be, as it was in old version with PBEM, email passwords are personal only, TA PBEM has nothing to do inside of email boxes, just sent info and results! Its my point and meaning which I told to @Deltium and @prastle in last Tournament cause don't trust any site to give my mail; I created an exclusively gmail account to game PBEM but was late to use it, so only MARTI dice results came into my box, all rest was manual. Thanks and greets.

[Raville]

This post is deleted!

[redrum]

@Raville I think you are misunderstanding. You don't need passwords for people that you are sending emails TO (if I send you an email, I don't need your password) but you do need the password from the email account you are sending FROM. TripleA doesn't have its own email server/account so sends emails from the player's account which is why you need to put in the email/password of whatever email provider you want to send emails FROM.

[Raville]

@redrum TA server should just send information to gamers, doesn't need our mails passwords and box to send that information, system just send to gamers what's need to as results, info, etc. same as MARTI dice. We don't send game info but TA PBEM system just send it... Do am I wrong? All is outside private boxes to avoid hacking.

[Raville]

But not problem as I created a PBEM personal mail account just to game PBEM under such conditions, thanks & cheers.

[redrum]

@Raville That would be ideal but there are some technical challenges as save games are much larger than dice results. It also has never worked that way and has always used player's individual email accounts for sending the save games. It could potentially be changed in the future but I think that's probably outside of what @RoiEX was looking to do in these changes.

My advice at this current time is if you don't want to have TripleA send emails from your personal email account then:

1. Create an email just for TripleA
2. PBF intead of PBEM so it uses your forum account rather than your email account
3. Manually save the game and email it to your opponent

[RoiEX]

The biggest problem with using a "global email" is that if we did that without any authentication, one could use our service to spam another ones email account and create something like a dos attack.
So in any case we'd need authentication, which might defeat its purpose already.