MT 1.3b15 update

[trevor]

... it sort of defeats the purpose of an Observer.

There needs to be a definition of what the purpose of an Observer is before that point can be debated.

Splitting hairs phergus

An Observer: One who can connect to your server that is not part of your official group and may not have been explicitly invited, has very limited permissions, and whose purpose is to observe.

[RPTroll]

I think I'm confused. Does the observer need to type in a password or not? Can they just join anyone's game regardless of invite?

[Phergus]

... it sort of defeats the purpose of an Observer.

There needs to be a definition of what the purpose of an Observer is before that point can be debated.

Splitting hairs phergus
An Observer: One who can connect to your server that is not part of your official group and may not have been explicitly invited, has very limited permissions, and whose purpose is to observe.

Not really as you and others seem to be attaching other baggage to the observer role that isn't in that simple definition of the purpose.

Having a password doesn't defeat the stated purpose of observing. It just limits the observers to those that have been supplied a password.

Previously you implied that the purpose of observers was so that a game could attract other players through the having Observers "sit in" on a game. Is this "the" purpose or is it just one of them?

To me an Observer doesn't automatically have any ability to communicate with either players or the GM of a game. Is this an ability that is being assumed but not stated?

[Mortani]

How about you go wild and create some for of ACL type setup? Meaning allow the end user to create different roles with the ability to determine what each role can do. You could of course include the predifined ones as a default. Not sure if this would be worth pushing back any other dev efforts for though.

[RPTroll]

If you are able to set the number of observers to zero you could effectively lock them out of the game even if the game did show up on the RPTools list.

[RPMiller]

If you are able to set the number of observers to zero you could effectively lock them out of the game even if the game did show up on the RPTools list.

DING, DING, DING!! We have a winner!

I personally like the idea of an observer role. I'll use the term role as different from permissions here.

Possible roles:
GM
Co-GM
Player
Observer

Possible permissions:
Add Map
Modify Map
Add Token
Modify Token
Add Stamp
Modify Stamp
Chat with All
Chat with GM
No Chat

Comments?

[Phergus]

That jives with what myself and others have already posted in this thread.

[RPTroll]

There is another outstanding request involving turn movement so that the GM cycles through the players letting each move in turn but locking the others from moving. It would be possible to use the same permissoins mechanism for this as well.

In this case you would have another entry in RPMillers list for Moving Player.

[Frozen-Solid]

We just updated to 1.3.b15 and there's a bug with the port number (it keeps adding a comma) on the connect to server window, and the only workaround is to hit enter rather than click OK.

Unfortunately, the game still says "connection refused" and won't connect to my server.

[Cweord]

I have to say, I like both ideas, being able to set the no of observers including 0, and handing out permissions opens up options if you want to try multiple GMs (would make life complicated, but someone may want to).

The more functionality MT has the more uses people will find for it, though the trick as always is functionality vs an overly complicated UI

[trevor]

We just updated to 1.3.b15 and there's a bug with the port number (it keeps adding a comma) on the connect to server window, and the only workaround is to hit enter rather than click OK.

Unfortunately, the game still says "connection refused" and won't connect to my server.

Thanks for the bug report, I'll get that fixed for the next build (most likely next monday)

[Frozen-Solid]

Thanks for the bug report, I'll get that fixed for the next build (most likely next monday)

No prob... but feces... Monday :[

Seriously though, I love this app. It's made my life so much easier and I wish it was around when I was first running online D&D games. Keep up the amazing work man.

[Azhrei]

I'm hoping that I can take some load off of trevor so he can continue to work on the "cool stuff". And maybe I can actually contribute back to MT a little bit!

(I have Eclipse installed on my Mac but haven't used it yet. But I'll try configuring the CVS client and grabbing the code tonight.)

So i've got Eclipse all updated and the MT code checked out.

I started looking around and made some changes to PersistenceUtil.saveCampaign() and it appears to work! I had to comment out a couple lines at the top of the function, add two lines to open the XML stream, and then change "os.close" to "out.close" at the bottom of the function, and now I can save my campaign as XML (although I can ONLY save it as XML, since I didn't make any modifications to allow for multiple file types).

If I ZIP the resulting XML, it's actually smaller than the original ".cmpgn" file format! That's a pleasant surprise. I haven't done any optimization to the XML generation, so the element names are pretty long and pretty ugly. I don't plan to do any of those optimizations, since there isn't much payoff in it.

I'm now going to create a campaign in 1.3 and save that one so that I have something to compare against. Once I have a list of elements in 1.3, I can start writing an XSLT that converts 1.2 to 1.3. I think this may be the longest phase, given that the file is 12MB+ in size.

Does anyone know of a tool that will automate some of this checking? What I'd love is a diff tool for XML that will tell me which elements are new/removed/modified between two XML files. I'm going to start my search for such a tool now, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask here first.

[trevor]

I'm now going to create a campaign in 1.3 and save that one so that I have something to compare against.

Fantastic !

What you might do is start with a simpler case, a single bounded map, a single unbounded map, with one token each

As for diff tools, nothing comes to mind directly, although in eclipse you can select both files and right click -> Compare With-> Each Other, eclipse's diff is pretty good

[Emryys]

There is another outstanding request involving turn movement so that the GM cycles through the players letting each move in turn but locking the others from moving.

This is one I'm waiting for...