Choosing Sides

[Greyshaft]

OK - I didnt pick up that Move Allocation would not be BETWEEN Major Powers. No problems there then.

Regarding the airpower example - each air attack (and to some extent naval combat) requires a series of interactions between the two involved players. If I sent 2 bombers and 3 fighters against your industrial hex and you send up 4 fighters in defense then classic Wif demands a series of combat rounds where we inflict causalties on each other and abort/kill one counter per combat until one side is dead or runs away - maybe 5-10 interactions in this example. Multiply that by 3 players per side and then by all of the air combat phases (Port Attack + Ground Strike + Strategic Bombing + Paradrop + etc etc) and there's a heck of a lot of emailing going on. I think I once calculated that there were potentially over 100 emails per impulse even without that tactical combat resolution for air and naval combat.

Do those interactions need to go through the co-ordinator?

[Shannon V. OKeets]

They wouldn't be emails. The PBEM system will use emails (a future thread this month). The multi-player system will useTCP/IP communications. What this means in practice is that the MWIF program will send and receive game messages to the clones of itself over the internet without a player having to do anything other than just issue the orders to his units.

For example, Japan decides what air attacks to make in China, and MWIF-Japan sends the appropriate message to MWIF-GE which forwards it to MWIF-IT and MWIF-CW. MWIF-CW then forwards the message to MWIF-US and other players on the Allies side. All of this happens as soon as Japan commits to his air attacks. The other players see Japan's attacks on their screens without having to do anything. At that point the US player needs to decide how he wants the Chinese to respond. When he commits to his decision, that message flows in the reverse order back to Japan.

The reason I have created the team leaders is to control the message flow so all the different MWIF programs update correctly. Having Japan send a message straight to the US might seem easier but then everyone else has to get the new information too. It is easiest to set up the TCP/IP communications with two servers (the team leaders) with everyone else on a side being a client to his team leader's server. This is a client-server design. For communications between the team leaders, one of the them would be a server and the other a client. It is immaterial to game play which one is which - it is only an artifact of the TCP/IP design.

As I think I wrote down somewhere, ideally this would all be transparent to the players. They would just make there decisions on their MWIF and everybody else would see it on theirs.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Sorry about the last post I was playing around with adding JPG pictures and it went off before I knew it!

What the post should have said was that I have two JPG files that cover setting up a new game: the bidding process and the assignment of players to teams. The grapihcs show how the TCP/IP communication links would connect the players.

If you have comments about the JPGs, you should refer to the paragraph numbers. You won't be able to cut and paste the text embedded in the pictures.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

This topic has had no new posts in 2 weeks. Therefore, I am going to believe that the discussion is complete.

What this means, is that I will go with the design for team play as presented in this thread making the corrections and clarifications that you (as a group) have provided.

To make this very clear: I am going to start writing code for the multi-player version of MWIF based on the team play design. I do not intend to revisit the design for this topic unless something major forces me to.

[Greyshaft]

OK. I'll start building the Test Plan for multiplayer based on whats currently in this thread.
Doubtless there will be tweaks

Here we go guys!!! [:)]