Frood AACalc Dicey / Sim / Odds Calculator: Updates and Opinions

[frood]

Ha ha ha! NPB’s post made me laugh out loud, literally. That’s awesome.

It tickled my funny bone - errr, never mind.

[frood]

Thanks for the move, djensen.

All right, here are my thoughts for making AACalc into a better PBEM/PBF tool, considering the difficulties that have arisen in certain games.

First, I will add several new fields to the form, which will be optional:

Game ID
Game password
Turn (eg. US1, Ger5, whatever)

Here’s what they’ll do:

Enter a battle as normal, and if you also enter a Game ID (of your own choosing, I recommend something unique) and a password, along with at least 2 validly formulated e-mail addresses in the e-mail field, a game record will be created (or added to if it already exists and you entered the correct password).

This game record will contain, for starters, the e-mail addresses as well as the ruleset and luck model indicated on the form. For future battles it will only be necessary to enter the game ID and password, and results will automatically be sent to the registered e-mail addresses, and the battle will be run using the ruleset and luck model initially chosen. This prevents cheating by selecting Classic to have the defenders tanks defend on 2 instead of 3 - one could catch this but one might also get away with it.

Also if a game # is entered the battle will not run in sim mode, only once.

Finally of course the battle results will be recorded for verification in case of e-mail failure.

A turn name should also be entered if a Game ID is used.

Then I’ll create a new subpage called “Confirm results” or something even catchier, which initially will just show a single field asking for a game ID. Enter the game, and all the recorded turns will be listed. Click on one of the turns, and it will show all the battles rolled under that turn. This page will NOT require a password - the password is merely to prevent others from rolling dice in your game. This prevents the scenario where one player might say “but I never rolled those dice, someone else did.” The password will only be known to the players, while the game ID can be shared so that others can check out your results.

The A&A.org topic # might be a good choice for game ID.

Finally, these new fields would survive the “Clear” button, so that you can leave the Game ID, password and turn label for your entire turn without having to re-enter them.

[frood]

Also, with this kind of a record, I could conceivably build a tool that would review an entire game and analyze how lucky/unlucky the dice were.

[cyan]

@froodster:

Also, with this kind of a record, I could conceivably build a tool that would review an entire game and analyze how lucky/unlucky the dice were.

you might have to go over 100% luckly with me but that sounds really cool. would the ID be only numbers or would it have letters?

[frood]

I’m leaning toward numbers only, for security reasons.

[rjclayton]

Using the topic ID is a great idea.  Tonez is already using this to identify games in TripleA.

To find your topic id, just locate it in the URL when you are viewing your game thread in the forum. (eg. the topic id for this thread is 8166).

[frood]

I’m wondering if with the Game ID there’d be a way for my dicey to post the results directly to the forum here. How does TripleA do it? I’ll pm tonez…

[Jennifer]

Wow, yer massively expanding, Dan. Kewl.

[frood]

Well, I haven’t actually done anything yet.  :wink:

Which is maybe good - my idea keeps evolving, so I save a lot of work building it one way and then another etc. I really hope to have some kind of result audit mechanism in place for the 2nd round of the tourney

[frood]

It’s really not that big of an expansion, in terms of work.

My bid page already creates a (temporary) game record with both player’s e-mail addresses. I just have to add the ruleset to that form, and maybe make bidding optional, and then not erase the record after the bid is complete, and then add to the record with each game turn that gets rolled.

And the dice data is already generated by the dicey, it just has to be saved and the functions to display the results are already built too.

In other news, I am considering removing the tech units (SSub, HBom and JFig), and maybe eventually adding a way to add them back in if desired, but keep the default form simpler with fewer units. That button would also add in NA units, as I create support for them. That may not happen for a while though now, other priorities…

[frood]

All right, I have done a preliminary piece at http://frood.net/aacalc/makegame/

It’s an enhanced version of my bid page, but the page also lets you declare who will be axis rather than bidding, if you did your bid elsewhere or don’t want to bid. You can also bid negative (to give the Allies $)

Right now it just creates the game record.

The next step is to modify AACalc so you can enter the game ID# and then have your results logged. That should be fairly easy actually. The big question is, do I remove the current e-mail field to keep the form simpler and force people to use the game log? I’m not a big fan of forcing options on people, but I will be posting an announcement that Frood.net will not vouch for PBEM results that are not logged in a game record on my server.

Then the final step will be to build an application for looking up results, prolly also not a biggie.

[rjclayton]

Frood,

Might of found a bug in aacalc…

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=8825.msg161794#msg161794

[frood]

All right I am pumped - I have uploaded a Beta (http://frood.net/aacalc/beta/)

Please try it out and give me your thoughts.

Basically, there are two sub pages, I will write documentation later but it’s pretty self-explanatory.

One page is “Create Game ID” - enter the required info and create a game ID. For simplicity, just select one player to be Axis unless you want to try the bid function too. Rememberize your game ID and password, without these you can’t log results to your game record.

Once you have those, go back to the beta AACalc page, and enter your combat as normal, plus the game ID, password, Turn ID and territory - all of these are required for logging the result. The nice thing is that they persist for your session (except territory, which clears at the end of a battle) so you only have to enter them once.

The second sub page comes in after you have rolled a few battles. Click on “Confirm results” and enter the Game ID #. Once you hit submit, all the recorded turns will be listed. Click on the turn (you’ll probably see just one unless you entered battles under different turn IDs) and the page will show you the dice as they were rolled for all battles in turn J5 or whatever.

As a sample, you can enter Game # 12345 in the Confirmation page to check it out. One issue though is that the game records may get a little large, I may have it purge turns that are more than a week old or something.

So I’m pretty pumped.

Feedback?

[frood]

Okay, the new page is now the default, after some half-assed testing - the regular way still works for PBEM anyway.

[Guest]

Dan, we have a serious problem.

JSP just rolled a combat sequence of 4 battles against me, all very small battles.

I received duplicate combat rolls, with different results, for EVERY battle.

[frood]

oopsie - I’ll put the old one back until I fix this. That’s really weird. Has JSP confirmed that he only rolled once, or was he testing each battle once? (ok prolly not…)

If it helps, I’ll declare arbitrarily that the first of each set of combat results are the valid ones - no wait - what’s the game #? The results stored in the game log will be the valid ones! Yay! unless there are two there as well…

[frood]

Were you attempting to use the Game logging function? My guess is not. Looks like it tried to log it anyway, without a game ID #. Better fix that…

Ok the old one is uploaded again. I guess I tested the new functionality, but not how the old one would work.  :oops:  :oops:  :oops:

[Guest]

Check the log, see what (if anything) you have recorded there.

I do not ahve a game number (and none are included in any of the e-mails), I am using DAAK, JSP is using Frood.

[frood]

This is very strange - I just tried it, and received results in triplicate, all with different dice.

Bizarre. Because each time it e-mails it should also be posting a notice to the screen, but only one notice appears, so WTF?  :? :?

[Guest]

Dan, please de-activate (ar move to an un-linked location while you de-bug) the logging dicey.

Otherwise I will have to de-certify Frood for Tournament use until repaired and confirmed.