Experimental webserver

[wobbly]

Played poschengband a little & had a few issues. The chat window is covering my hps in the display. When I go to change pickup/destroy settings (_), down arrow registers as 2, and Ctrl-W (save & quit) closes my browser window (in firefox).

[Gwarl]

Okay, I can fix things to adapt based on screen resolution. (Guessing the problem there is having fewer pixels across than me).

The numpad/directional key stuff is not easy but I'm working on it. Ultimately I might have to patch PCB with bits lifted from V.

I'm not sure if I can suppress all of the browser shortcuts, but isn't it ctrl+X to save&quit?

[wobbly]

Ctrl-X saves the game (and works perfectly fine). Ctrl-W saves & quits the mognomitor or whatever the pickup/squelch thing is called(The thing you get to pressing _). I've found a work around for now but it's quite awkward.

To clarify I can use the arrows in-game by turning on numlock. However I can't do that in the mog-what-ever you call it.

[Gwarl]

Okay if the mogaminator is the issue there I think I can get as far as letting people edit their .prf files in the browser seperately before very long. Control/escape sequence handling will take longer.

[MITZE]

Server's borked again!

Title says it all.

[Gwarl]

Okay I switched it back to self-rebooting mode, I'll be doing all my development on another machine henceforth. Do you know what you were doing when it crashed?

[MITZE]

Okay I switched it back to self-rebooting mode, I'll be doing all my development on another machine henceforth. Do you know what you were doing when it crashed?

The last thing I remember doing is running into a wall, but I run into walls all the time and it usually doesn't crash the server.

[Ironshod Al]

I tried angband.live for competition 206. My character can be viewed here.
In my first game I have encountered a few problems. They aren't bad, just annoying enough that I will prefer playing on my own computer:

• Right now I can't inscribe items as '{' doesn't do anything. It locks the game, so it may be stuck in a hidden prompt. ESC a couple of times will return input to the game.
• Another problem is that the monster list '[' doesn't work. Thus I'll have to look at each monster using 'l' or '*' to figure out if they are dangerous. The item list ']' works fine.
• Arrow keys don't work in the auto-pickup/squelch editor. It types digits instead. I'll haven't spent time to figure out if the cursor can be moved using ctrl+<some key>. I currently use the basic squelch feature and accept that I can't auto-pickup items and have to look at item prompts to figure out which letter is currently mapped to an item.

Since it's all keyboard related it may be because I use a danish keyboard layout (fitting latin-1 / iso8859-1). The usual placement of {, [, ], } and \ and | is changed to make room for local characters (&aring;, &oslash; and &aelig. < and > are moved as well, but they seem to work. I have been able to climb staircases without problems. I haven't experimented to see if the keys I miss are available in their 'english position'.

Apart from these minor hickups, I like the setup. It is easy to use and account creation was straightforward. It does take a bit to get used to the different look for walls, but that's fine.
My game began to lag noticably after a while (past the first hour), but I have no idea if this had anything to do with the server or some slowdown on my connection.



Edit: I did a couple of quick tests.
I can access inscriptions and the monster list by switching my keyboard layout to english. It doesn't work using danish layout where { and [ are accessed using alt gr+7 (inscriptions) and alt gr+8 (monster list). alt gr+9 (item list) works just fine. Pressing the 'english' position for { and [ doesn't work with the danish layout either.

Edit 2: I tested the addtional cursor movement keys in the auto-pickup/sqelch editor. I can't use them either.
Pressing ctrl+N to move the cursor down will open new tabs in Firefox instead. Toggling numlock didn't change the behaviour of the arrow keys. They still return numbers instead of moving the cursor. Therefore I can't use the advanced pickup/squelch setup. It's a minor problem as 'k' still allows me to squelch items.

Conclusion:
Playing on the server is doable as long as I remember to switch my keyboard to english layout. There's a bit of muscle memory to overcome, but not anything detrimental to gameplay. I'll continue playing online, at least during comp206.

[Gwarl]

Hey thanks for the feedback.

In my first game I have encountered a few problems. They aren't bad, just annoying enough that I will prefer playing on my own computer

It's useless having the thing if people prefer not to use it, so I will be making a point of trying to fix the problems.

The numpad issues in poschengband are difficult to get a grip on, and will probably persist for some time unless I have a eureka moment. Instead I plan to let people edit their .prf files (such as the autopicker) directly in the browser.

Having people start playing on the server is great for identifying bugs and problems, I hope to have made many improvements by the end of the competition.

[Ironshod Al]

It's useless having the thing if people prefer not to use it, so I will be making a point of trying to fix the problems.

Agreed. That's also why I tried to identify workarounds. I like the idea of a common playground.

The numpad issues in poschengband are difficult to get a grip on, and will probably persist for some time unless I have a eureka moment. Instead I plan to let people edit their .prf files (such as the autopicker) directly in the browser.

That would be cool. All I could wish for right now is a way to edit the auto-picker file and reload it in the game. In PosChengband as the game progresses, most items become junk and increase the risk that I'll miss something important. The other squelch option ('k' without editing the file) works too, but is a bit more tedious to use as I have to squelch each type of {average} armor and each type of {average} weapon.

Having people start playing on the server is great for identifying bugs and problems, I hope to have made many improvements by the end of the competition.

Considering that I started playing yesterday, with this thread as my only introduction, I think the basic setup is pretty sound. So, thank you for doing this.


By the way, I decided to call my user Ironshod_Al on the server. I don't know if there is any problems using spaces in names, but noticing that you create user directories on the server I didn't want to risk anything.
The character dumps work fine with spaces as long as I remember to change space to %20 in the URL.

[wobbly]

It's very crude but ESC, g? (cursor in the menu) & a, b, c or d does move the cursor. Slow & awkward but in some cases better than having to manually squelch.

Also you can get something semi-workable by just remembering lines at the top over ride lines below them.

[Ironshod Al]

Hey, that's a decent way of doing it. Thanks for that suggestion. I usually write changes at the top anyway.

The main thing is that this lets me navigate to a new line and start typing. I believe the editor remember the cursor position, so I only have to navigate occasionally. Also, while crude it's not much worse than pressing . to initiate running.

Well, I'll have to start a new game soon. I'm running out of stuff to complain about.

[Ironshod Al]

Is there any way to recover an old session?

I happily forgot about commands going to Firefox and pressed ctrl+w to close the autopicker. Sadly, ctrl+w also means close in Firefox, so my browser shut down. I was on DL1, so it recovering the game is not super important.

Returning to the server and logging in I get the following message when I try to start PosChengband:

Error: There are old temporal files. Make sure you are not running two
game processes simultaneously. If the temporal files are garbages of
old crashed process,  you can delete it safely.
Do you delete old temporal files? [y/n]

This indicates that the old process is still running and probably wont stop because it is stuck in the auto-picker editor.

[Gwarl]

The server kills processes when it detects the socket closing. This isn't ideal but it's better than not killing them. Poschengband interprets this as a crash. The correct answer to that question is 'yes', delete all temporal files.

Edit: I'll note I seem to be lagging horridly this morning, but it might be windows updates hogging my bandwidth or something.

[Ironshod Al]

The correct answer to that question is 'yes', delete all temporal files.

Great! That worked. I was back in the game - sans changes to auto-pickup as I hadn't saved anything before pressing ctrl+w. I have managed to save some changes afterwards, so everything looks fine so far.