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PBEM Turn sequence (again)


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The thread suggesting an alternative to the pbem turn sequence really got me thinking. (You know, where player A generates a movie, player B watches and plots moves, then player A watches, plots moves, and generates a new movie.)

I read all of the naysayers' comments, and they seem to boil down to two themes:

a) If Player B views the movie before Player A does, then Player B can keep rewatching it until he gets results that he likes, and

B) Player B will have the opportunity to crack the code and screw things up for Player A.

As to the first argument, this is based upon a mistaken understanding of the game engine (AFAIK). A movie is not the occurrence of the events -- it is only a replaying of the events. Once Player A generates the movie, it is done and locked in. One could say that the events actually transpire during the brief period when Player A watches the progress bar filling in on his/her screen. Everything after that is simply a replay.

SO... Player B can watch the movie over and over again until the cows come home, but everything will happen EXACTLY the same way each and every time.

Therefore, if Player B were to watch and make plots, and then email the combined movie/plot file to Player A, the movie that Player A would watch would be exactly identical. (Well, that is to say that the events that occur are identical. Obviously, the events that are actually seen will differ.)

As for the "hacking" problem, the threat of this occurring under these circumstances would be no greater than exists under the current arrangement. Frankly, AFAIK almost everyone is much more interested in PLAYING than in hacking. Hacking codes takes lost of time and energy away from game playing. My bets are that it would not be a problem (any more than it is now...)

[Edited for clarification.]

[ April 08, 2002, 04:10 PM: Message edited by: Liebchen ]

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What fallacy? I am describing a desired change to the game engine, not the way that it works now. :rolleyes:

The thread of a couple days ago (to which I refer in my opening sentence) hypothesized that BTS could arrange so that the game would allow pbem to take place with only two files exchanged per turn. Try to follow along, keeping in mind that this was only a suggestion, and not a reflection of the actual current state of the game:

1- [Players set up]

2- Player A plots moves, sends move file to Player B.

3- Player B plots moves, generates a movie, sends to Player A.

4- Player A views the movie, plots move for turn 2, sends a combined file (this was the suggestion) to Player B.

5- Player B views the movie (from turn 1), plots moves for turn 2, and generates a new movie for turn 2.

6- Cycle repeats

The suggestion was that the game engine would allow viewing of a movie by player A, and appends to the movie file a set of move plots. This would be received by Player B's machine, which would allow viewing of the movie and would then incorporate the move plots into generating the next movie.

The idea was to reduce the number of files exchanged per turn. Most people liked the idea, but some worried about certain problems which I believe were misguided (see my first post).

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Hmmmm. On second thought, the original sequence did have the same potential problem I was thinking of (Player B finding a way to watch the movie before he sends it -- you haven't changed the amount of information there, so it's an old issue, not a new one). So it's a concatenation of Steps 5 and 7.

*frown*

That should actually work then, assuming that both parties are, as usual, trusted not to crack the files. My bad.

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Has anyone considered that fewer turns may make the files too large? In some scenarios, the turn files are huge. Well over 1.5 MB. In order to send the files, I had to break them in two parts, and my opponent had to recombine them before playing the turn. This is because some email systems set limits on the size of attached files.

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The files contain the actual movies right now, right (well, full combat results and so forth)?

If, during the engine rewrite, they change it so that what gets sent is only the minimum information needed to generate the movie (the orders, current state, and complete pseudorandom number generator configuration) then both systems should be able to generate identical movies on their own.

That should result in smaller files... of course, it'd need to run through the math every viewing, unless there was an option to stick the movie in the saved file once it'd been (locally) generated.

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In the current system, there are one small and two large PBEM files per turn. Lets call the small size X and the large size Y.

The proposed system would require two files per turn, with sizes of Y and (X+Y), respectively. Because X is usually smaller than 30kb, this increase in size would be almost neglegible.

Dschugaschwili

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Mud, this was tried by BTS when the TCP/IP code was built into CM. It didn't work because CM uses floating point arithmetics and different CPUs calculate those numbers differently, leading to small differences that let the movies on both computers diverge. Bad luck.

Dschugaschwili

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