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

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.

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

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…

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

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…

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.

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?

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

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…

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:

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?  :? :?

I found the problem - it had solely to do with the Google Ads I added to the page. The google ads work by Google’s ad serve viewing the page first to determine the content, and then it gets loaded again to display in the browser.

So it was not at all a result of anything I changed in my dicey code because of the logging feature. Combat is handled exactly as before, the only change is that results can also be logged. The problem was that my dicey would run once or twice in the background when Google viewed the page. The user doesn’t see those results, but the script still does it’s e-mailing exactly as normal.

Stupid me had to add the ads at the same time as I added other features.

I have disabled the ad, tested it online and found that it works normally now. The reason I didn’t notice in my local testing is that my local machine does not send the e-mails, so I did not notice any multiple e-mails.