Automated PBW Game Turn?

[tbontob]

What is the best, easiest way to submit a game turn on a PBW Game?

I've been sending my game turn as an attachment to a e-mail.

But it is such a drag...searching for the .plr file and then submitting it. Not to mention the possibility of sending the wrong .plr file.

I notice some players upload their turns. One even has a "realtime upload game turn".

What is the difference? And is there a way to automate the process?

[Arkcon]

I've been logging on to the PBW website, and useing the upload and download functions there.

On my Win98 computer, I put a shortcut to SE4's savegame folder on my desktop so I can find folders easily.

Useing email is a pain for me. I use hotmail, and there's ads, and a separate page for attachment download and upload. Really irritating. But I gotta do it for a play by email game I'm in. My friend insists I zip my game file before I attach so Hotmail and Yahoo Mail don't "screw up the data's extension and make the file unuseable". He is not clear on the mechanisim and the effect.

Now realtime may be the Java-ware realtime client. It automates a lot of the above steps, and polls the server on it's own, starts SE4 when it downloads a turn, sends the file as soon as you're done. It's on the SE4 CD. It sounds cool, but I have a dialup, so I will wait till I get a cable modem setup before I learn to use it.

[ September 24, 2002, 14:40: Message edited by: Arkcon ]

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by tbontob:
I notice some players upload their turns. One even has a "realtime upload game turn".

Check out the PBW Realtime Client. You can read about it in the F.A.Q..

Geoschmo

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Arkcon:
Now realtime may be the Java-ware realtime client. It automates a lot of the above steps, and polls the server on it's own, starts SE4 when it downloads a turn, sends the file as soon as you're done. It's on the SE4 CD. It sounds cool, but I have a dialup, so I will wait till I get a cable modem setup before I learn to use it.

Exactly. And it IS cool, very cool. You can use it on a dialup, but you have to stay connected the whole time you play your turn. So if you take a long time to play your turns and you pay by the minute it might not be a good idea.

The shortcuts to the savegame folder is an excellent idea for those using the web interface to upload turns

There also used to be a PBEM helper, which IIRC automates the playing of the turns and should work with PBW just fine. IIRC it doesn't work with web based email like hotmail or yahoo, but you can get free email clients that will work with some of those web-based email accounts and use the PBEM helper I believe. I have never actually done it though so I wouldn't know how to set it up or anything. You should be able to find a link for it doing a search here for "PBEM Helper".

Geoschmo

[tbontob]

Thanx guys. And I intend to install it.

From the looks of it I have to agree with George's assessment.

And it IS cool, very cool.

A short discription of it is given in 4.0 of the FAQ's

[tbontob]

The PBW Real Time Client requires JRE:

The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is freely available from , and is also available on the Space Empires IV Gold CD. The JRE is required to use the Real-Time Client (RTC). To install, double-click on the executable and follow the instructions. For ease of use, we recommend installing to the default directory.

I have been told in another thread that
-The main directory refers to the folder that holds SE4
-The default directory can be any one of a number of sub-folders within the main directory.

But there are many sub-folders! Which one do I install JRE?

EDIT: In the quote, the URL is in my message but is left out in the posting? Anybody know why?

[ September 24, 2002, 17:58: Message edited by: tbontob ]

[Suicide Junkie]

In this case, the default would be the one that the installer starts with.

If you don't tell it to go somewhere else, it will go in the default folder for the RTC.

PS: as for the URL, you might have been trying to use HTML.

Try: [ URL=www.somewhere.com] This is the clickable text label [/url]
Which gives:
This is the clickable text label

[ September 24, 2002, 18:06: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[geoschmo]

Hehe, welcome to the wonderful world of windows. There are sixteen ways of doing everything, but only 10 of them are the correct way.

As with everything else the meaning is in the context. In this context when it says the default directory it is refering to the directory the the Java JRE tries to load itself to by default. This will have nothing to do with the Space Empires directories or anything else.

Once you have loaded the java JRE the PBW RTC client program (It will ahve a .jar extension) goes in your default Space Empires IV directory, that is the same one withthe Se4.exe program.

Hope that clears it up.

Geoschmo

[tbontob]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:

PS: as for the URL, you might have been trying to use HTML.

Try: [ URL=www.somewhere.com] This is the clickable text label [/url]
Which gives:
This is the clickable text label

Cool. To post my own clickable text lable, do I remove all the brackets? Or just the middle two. i.e.===> ] and [.

[Suicide Junkie]

No, you just have to remove the space between "[" and "URL=..."