Unveiling The Official Soldat Web Gather

[jrgp]

Hello Soldat Forums,

I am here to unveil a project MM and I have been working on for several months now: The Official Soldat Web Gather.

This is much like current IRC gathers, such as the ones in #sna.gather and #soldat.mapping, except instead of relying on IRC, this gather is in your web browser utilizing AJAX and Javascript.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept of gathering: a gather is where a game with a certain number of rounds of Soldat is organized and prepared on the fly, as opposed to pubs. This is sort of like clanwars, except without the clans.

http://soldat.thd.vg/en/gather

The in-game commands are:
 !p/!pause - Pause the game
 !up/!unpause - Unpause a paused game
 !map MAPNAME - Change the map of the current round
 !r/!restart - Restart the current round
 !unbanlast - unban last banned player

How it works:
 - First, go here to login: http://soldat.thd.vg/en/login
 - Then go to gather page: http://soldat.thd.vg/en/gather
 - At all times there is a queue for non-running gathers.
 - When you join a queue, you are not allowed to join a queue for any other gather.
 - When the queue you are in fills up, the web browser of each member of the party emits a beep followed by a join game link.
 - The game lasts for the number of rounds specified by the website.
 - When the gather ends, you are all kicked, the server shuts down, and the queue for this gather is then emptied and ready to be filled up again.

Additionally:
 - If you are in a queue that has not yet filled up and close your browser window/tab, in 30 seconds of not returning to the page you will be removed from the queue.
 - http://soldat.thd.vg has a friends system where you can add people to your buddy list (assuming they accept your request). When one of your friends are in a gather, their name turns cyan.
 - In order to use the gather, you must be logged in. http://soldat.thd.vg uses the exact same accounts that the SoldatForums use so just use your normal username and password

What will be added in the near future:
 - Player statistics (largely just involves me copying over code from my U13 rentals panel and tweaking it slightly)
 - Possibly more in-game commands
 - Web chat (as soon as I get parts of it working efficiently)
 - More gather servers, such as ones like Realistic Inf, HTF, Rambo, and others. The way I have the logic set up, adding more gather servers is extremely easy.
 - IE support. It should currently work great in Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, etc

Thanks to:
 - Myself for writing all the code
 - MM for the idea and development encouragement
 - Furai (aka Wookash) for really useful suggestions on the gather's usability and pascal scripting logic
 - FliesLikeABrick for hosting and suggestions on the efficient way of doing things behind the scenes
 - The people/organizations behind PHP, Ruby, Python, Apache, Bash, MySQL, Javascript, DOM, & JSON since they are the tools I'm using

Talk to us:
 - The discussion and alpha/beta testing for the gather has been in #jrgp @ quakenet. Join the channel to chat with us live
 - Please post suggestions/ideas/bugs/etc in this thread

[xmRipper]

Mmm great use of ajax. Thanks jrgp

[DarkCrusade]

Great idea (even if there was Webchat before, this is far better)! I'll definetly use it!

[Toumaz]

Excellent! This is precisely what Soldat needed.

- MM for the idea and development encouragement

please elaborate

[jrgp]

- MM for the idea and development encouragement

please elaborate

I took my sweet ass time and kept procrastinating. Last week I was like "fuck it, I'm finishing it already" and rewrote the ~3k lines of Python I had in Ruby (required much less code, obviously) and got it in mostly a working state in around 3 days. Since then it's been mostly polishing the code and grinding off the bugs.

[PQ]

Excellent! This is precisely what Soldat needed.

- MM for the idea and development encouragement

please elaborate

If he'd just encouraged himself to develop something connected to soldat last 3 years.

[Toumaz]

- MM for the idea and development encouragement

please elaborate

I took my sweet ass time and kept procrastinating. Last week I was like "f**k it, I'm finishing it already" and rewrote the ~3k lines of Python I had in Ruby (required much less code, obviously) and got it in mostly a working state in around 3 days. Since then it's been mostly polishing the code and grinding off the bugs.

in what manner did the encouragement take place

[jrgp]

- MM for the idea and development encouragement

please elaborate

I took my sweet ass time and kept procrastinating. Last week I was like "f**k it, I'm finishing it already" and rewrote the ~3k lines of Python I had in Ruby (required much less code, obviously) and got it in mostly a working state in around 3 days. Since then it's been mostly polishing the code and grinding off the bugs.

in what manner did the encouragement take place

Him asking every now and then how it was going.

[Geoffrey]

#2Wai.soldat @ quakenet.org Soldat's heaven

Where we are all lol'ing at this.

Best of luck with this I suppose but I'm not sure it is really needed. And how did MM work on this with you if it was just encouragement.

[filip2322]

Sounds good,time too test this (myself).Join me

[VirtualTT]

There should be some kind of counter of on-line ppl and mini-chat.
Also join / leave buttons should be bigger and more noticeable.
Also also after you join it shouldn't hide join buttons for other gathers, instead it should delete you from previous gather if you are joining some new one.

[Prodigyx]

SoldatX.com released the first WebGather (?):

http://forums.soldat.pl/index.php?topic=36297.0

http://www.soldatx.com/webgather/

I will try it =)

[jrgp]

SoldatX.com released the first WebGather (?):

http://forums.soldat.pl/index.php?topic=36297.0

http://www.soldatx.com/webgather/

I will try it =)

Comptetition is important.

Thanks for the suggestions, vtt.

[homerofgods]

I take it you'd need to register in Soldat forums to be able to use this.

[jrgp]

I take it you'd need to register in Soldat forums to be able to use this.

Yes, which gains you your unified account that works here, on the linkdead forums, mm's blog, soldat.thd.vg, link-dead.thd.vg, and all upcoming sites for mm's projects.

[freestyler]

And I thought I finally had a chance to stop using 'freestyler' and use 'fri' instead. ._.

There should be some notice that you can use your SF account. I wouldn't know if it wasn't for this thread. And the error messages shouldn't be written in red text on brown background.

[SyavX]

It's so kindly to show user's e-mails on account details pages. Example: http://soldat.thd.vg/en/user/jrgp
I thought it depends on "Allow users to email you?" from SF account settings, but it doesn't...

[jrgp]

It's so kindly to show user's e-mails on account details pages. Example: http://soldat.thd.vg/en/user/jrgp
I thought it depends on "Allow users to email you?" from SF account settings, but it doesn't...

I'll get to that soon.

There should be some notice that you can use your SF account. I wouldn't know if it wasn't for this thread. And the error messages shouldn't be written in red text on brown background.

Yeah I'll get to that too.

[jrgp]

And how did MM work on this with you if it was just encouragement.

Just saw this. He did mockups in powerpoint and told me how it should work, look, and kept telling me what to do at each stage during its development.

[pavliko]

This is useless, we have our whole soldat community gathering in IRC...
Such thing should be implented in soldat and not some browser...
I bet 90% of the gather players use IRC