Announcing "Whose Turn Is It?" a PBEM turn management program

[A Canadian Cat]

Whose Turn Is It? Product Page

This utility program will help you manage your PBEM games for Combat Mission 2 titles (e.g. Battle for Normandy and Fortress Italy). Once you tell 'Whose Turn Is It?' where your CM2 game is installed you can see which PBEM games you have a turn to play and which PBEM games you are waiting for your opponent to play. You can then tell 'Whose Turn Is It?' where to find new turn files and where to put turn files for your opponents and 'Whose Turn Is It?' will copy your PBEM turns to and from your file synchronization tool.

This project is now just about ready to be fully released. For Windows users you can use it now. Myself and four other users have been using it for well over a year now and I can report that it works. The most serious bug I am working on fixing now is that one person cannot launch the game - but it works for others.

Check out the major features on the New and Noteworthy Page

When you want to get started make sure you read the Getting Started Guide

[A Canadian Cat]

What I need though is someone or a couple of people to try this out for the Mac. I have verified - from two people that it installs and runs in a Mac but I really need someone with the game on a Mac to do some testing for me.

If you have a Mac, a CM2 game and some time please PM me.

A couple of things to note this will not be going into the App Store and it uses Java. So you have to be willing to accept non app store software and already have Java installed. Java 1.6 and higher is required.

[A Canadian Cat]

Some background history for those that want to know more.

Way back in the summer of 2011 I got tired of copy files by hand for the limited number of PBEM games I had going at the time. Back then I think I had two or three games going and I looked around to find software to do the job for me. I found and wrote up this:

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=97839 Don't read it - yuck use WTII? or the existing H2HH before doing all that craziness.

I used that system for a long time but even with it working, figuring out which games were ready for me to play and which I was waiting for was painful. I thought "Computers should be doing this work". So I wrote Whose Turn Is It? The original program's job was just to look a your installed CM games' Incoming and Outgoing email folders to tell you what games you had going and whose turn it was to play each of them.

I thought it was useful so I offered it to a friend of mine (known here as @DungeonTiger). He said cool but "it is useless if it does not copy the files too". I said "what? you are not using the cool system I told you about". He called me crazy. After that conversation I went to work and added turn management functionality to WTII? He has been using it ever since. I was ready to announce about a year ago except I could not get an install that was sane for Mac users. The process to get there was longer than I thought. But we have finally arrived.

Now I use WTII? to manage all my games and at this moment I have 15 games against seven or eight players on the go. The program makes it easy to just see what turns need to be played and play what is available.

[Vanir Ausf B]

This may be a dumb question to ask, but what does this do that H2HH doesn't?

[A Canadian Cat]

This may be a dumb question to ask, but what does this do that H2HH doesn't?

Yeah, Green as Jade beat me to it for sure. I have not looked at the functionality of H2HH so I am not sure of all the differences but I am pretty sure the answer is "nothing substantial".

[kensal]

Yeah, Green as Jade beat me to it for sure. I have not looked at the functionality of H2HH so I am not sure of all the differences but I am pretty sure the answer is "nothing substantial".

Hi I can look at it from a mac perspective

[General Lee Irked]

H2HH does not work on any of my Macs anymore ever since I tried upgrading versions. I sure hope this works as I find it tiresome to manage multiple games.

[ZPB II]

This is supremely cool.

Thanks for taking your time to do this.

[Oddball_E8]

Always nice to have alternatives

Personally i don't PBEM tho, but its good for the community.

[Tarquelne]

I am not sure of all the differences but I am pretty sure the answer is "nothing substantial".

Call it "Whose Turn is it anyway?" and, each time a new turn arrives, have it display an improvised joke based off a headline pulled from google news and a random noun.

Heck, when I read the thread title I assumed that's what the program does.

[GreenAsJade]

H2HH does not work on any of my Macs anymore ever since I tried upgrading versions. I sure hope this works as I find it tiresome to manage multiple games.

Have you reported this to me?

Apologies if you did and I missed it. H2HH is still supported, I hate the idea that it's not working for somone.

I have one mac-related issue that I'm working on right now, should have a fix soon. I don't know if this is the problem you're talking about though.

GaJ

[GreenAsJade]

Looks like Ian's lifted the bar for the product collateral - nice web site!

GaJ

[A Canadian Cat]

Call it "Whose Turn is it anyway?" and, each time a new turn arrives, have it display an improvised joke based off a headline pulled from google news and a random noun.

Heck, when I read the thread title I assumed that's what the program does.

LOL great idea - can you be the product manager and create a list of new features?

[A Canadian Cat]

Looks like Ian's lifted the bar for the product collateral - nice web site!

Shucks thanks.

[sfhand]

Thanks for making and releasing this Ian. The only area I find h2hh wanting in is it doesn't play well with using multiple computers playing the same pbem. Is WTII capable of tracking whose turn it is when one or both sides of a battle are being played on multiple computers?

[A Canadian Cat]

Thanks for making and releasing this Ian. The only area I find h2hh wanting in is it doesn't play well with using multiple computers playing the same pbem. Is WTII capable of tracking whose turn it is when one or both sides of a battle are being played on multiple computers?

Oh, interesting. Let me think about that...

I am pretty sure pushing turns to your opponent will work fine but if you play a turn on one machine and then look at your turn status on the other it might not pull the new turn out of drop box and therefore would think that you still had to play it. That's from memory. Let me do an experiment and get back to you...

[General Lee Irked]

Have you reported this to me?

Apologies if you did and I missed it. H2HH is still supported, I hate the idea that it's not working for somone.

I have one mac-related issue that I'm working on right now, should have a fix soon. I don't know if this is the problem you're talking about though.

GaJ

Yes GaJ we shared some PM's unfortunately I never could get it to work.

However as I posted on your latest version thread all is good and working now!

Still, I am going to give ian.leslie's a test run. Both of you gentlemen have my sincere admiration for your contributions to the community.

Cheers

[GreenAsJade]

Hi Ian,

I have not looked at the functionality of H2HH so I am not sure of all the differences but I am pretty sure the answer is "nothing substantial".

One substantial difference is that WTII presents all the games that you are playing on one pane, something people ask for from time to time that's sadly still on my todo list (H2HH currently separates them by game-type)

The most significant difference, though, is the "chat" functionality - yet to be offered in WTII. It seems almost inevitable that this is something you will want to add soon, because it is one of the things that people say they like most about using H2HH.

This raises an important question: when you come to implement chat, will you make it work with the H2HH chat mechanism?

Right now, it is mildly irritating to have an opponent who's not using H2HH and you can't chat with them without moving to email. Often this situation is solved by persuading the oppo to start using H2HH With uptake of WTII not supporting chat, this situation will be exacerbated.

Similarly for the upcoming opponent-finder features. If we don't interoperate, there would be two pools of players - those who use H2HH and those who use WTII - with an increasing number of reasons not to play each other. I hope this is something we can avoid.

Regards,

GaJ

[A Canadian Cat]

The most significant difference, though, is the "chat" functionality - yet to be offered in WTII. It seems almost inevitable that this is something you will want to add soon, because it is one of the things that people say they like most about using H2HH.

This raises an important question: when you come to implement chat, will you make it work with the H2HH chat mechanism?

Yes, chat is on my list. I was planning to use plain text files so that non WTII users could just use them. However making WTII compatible with H2HH would be awesome.

You are thinking about making an opponent finding facility - cool. I would be up for cooperating together on that.

[dungeontiger]

I just want to say that I have been using this tool for a long time as part of Ian's testing and I think its a great! Its the only way I can keep track of all my turns and different versions.

Kudos to Ian for putting this together!

[A Canadian Cat]

Thanks for making and releasing this Ian. The only area I find h2hh wanting in is it doesn't play well with using multiple computers playing the same pbem. Is WTII capable of tracking whose turn it is when one or both sides of a battle are being played on multiple computers?

I will do some testing and give you a better answer as soon as I can. Right now getting the Mac version to work is taking all my time. As I predicted it is not going smoothly. Thanks for the help I am getting!!!

[jhdeerslayer]

I'll give your a program a try soon on Windows. Sadly H2HH has never worked with my GL installation and can't seem to get assistance with. Works fine with my other CM installations though so kind of a mystery what is wrong.

[GreenAsJade]

I'll give your a program a try soon on Windows. Sadly H2HH has never worked with my GL installation and can't seem to get assistance with. .

Whoa - this has slipped between the cracks for me. I'm not recognising you or this problem - have you reported it to me? Can you contact me outside this (Ian's) thread?

Ta,

GaJ

[jhdeerslayer]

Hey no problem and maybe I had the wrong email. Thanks for all your H2HH work!

I sent you a PM.

[A Canadian Cat]

I am happy to announce that, after a longer than anticipated delay, Whose Turn Is It? version 1.0 has been released. You can read about it and download it here: http://www.lesliesoftware.com/products/WhoseTurnIsIt/index.html

Thanks to my two Mac testers, I really appreciate your help. In the end what they showed me was that I really need to get a Mac to make it work, so I did.

This program requires Java 1.7. The Windows installers can check your machine and download Java from the Oracle web site. For the Mac you have to have Java 1.7 installed your self first.

I could not resist adding a few final touches:

The new features you see are turn list sorting, detection of new turn files added to drop box by your known opponents and hint text to say where WTII? is getting / sharing turn files. Full details can be found on the New and Noteworthy page.

Enjoy,

Ian