Speedup of PBEM

[Cani]

I assume there are a few persons who would like their opponents to return their movie turns a bit quicker. Here's my two ideas for how to do that.

Manually. Applicable in for example tourneys. Ask a person to be a movie processor. Each turn that there is no input requested from the player the movie processor is included as a CC. He/She then watches the movie, process the turn and sends the result to both players. (This can of course be done by the original player, it's a matter of who reads mail most often.) As I said, only applicable for tourneys and you need to find a person you can trust with a password.

Automatically. This would be a great improvement IMHO. All 'movie' turns are sent to a CM server, which process it and returns the result to both players. An option would be to send all turns to this server, which would allow gameplay where you don't know who your opponent is.

The automatic part needs support from BTS, so that a movie can be processed automatically. However, I figure this would be a nice feature in CMBB. A standalone executable that only processes movie turns (without displaying them). That way the movie turns can be processed without being viewed. For example, I receive the movie turn while I'm at work, I 'confirm' it with the standalone executable (that doesn't need a CD), and returns it. When I get home I watch the movie and hopefully the next turn has arrived so that I can plot my next turn.

[Dschugaschwili]

There have been a couple of suggestions on this topic before, most of them much easier to implement than your method. A search would turn them up, but it doesn't seem to work on the archives right now. The answer has always been no to this date because changing the system would require changing the PBEM file format, and the guys at BTS don't want to spend much time on stuff that works as it would delay CMBB even more.

Dschugaschwili