Bay 12 Games Forum

At that point I think the dwarves would simply carve out a couple floors of mountain, carve out some wheels under them, make a really wide ramp, and roll the mini-fort towards the intended destination.  Why leave your logistical support behind?

Hmm... mental images of a dwarf in a white lab coat at a blackboard with the text

"
Magma ~= 12,500°D.
Solar Surface Plasma ~= 20,000D.
Subsurface Plasma ~= 3,500,000D.
Central Matter ~= 25,000,000D.

Sun > Magma

Q.E.D.
"

And a crowd of dwarves in front with wide eyes and slack jaws as they suddenly rethink their hatred of the great vomit-inducer in the sky.

Edit: one of them figuring out that this would finally allow them to eat, sleep, and breathe adamantine... well, for a fraction of a second, kinda rough on the lungs, but it'd be the dwarfy way to go.

In DF's context, "Sun Physics" means much more than lighting.

What happens to anything that dwarves study for any length of time?

Tricky problem.  Each new challenge feature gives new "Can I" time and new insight.  Personally I'm looking forward to construction-destroying and/or digging enemies for higher-wealth sieges, and  internal factions and conflicts.  After many new-challenges-new-ways-to-drown-enemies-in-magma cycles we may come to something truly challenging and lastingly fun.

In other words, you could open up the browser folder, sort them by age, for instance, and select the top one. Looking at this, you can see all the previous games in this world, each comment, and if it includes any metadata.

How, exactly, would metadata such as
1) age of the world
2) name of the world (not necessarily the in-game name, just a consistent one)
3) uploader comment

Be associated with game files uploaded to an FTP server?

A few ways come to mind, but they're nasty and/or inconsistent, what way are you thinking of?

Thanks,
Keith

Then what is the lock for?

In the always-allow-downloads case, the lock is to preserve the existing straight-line descent of that world under the name of that world.  Any created-by-fork world would have to have a different name, so if you wanted to follow a particular world you could do so by remembering the name.

Without the lock "Player A" would have no way of knowing that "my upload will go under World X", because "Player B" could upload a new version to World X in the meantime and Player A would have to create World X-2 or something.  Essentially every upload would be a fork, with no child node having priority over its siblings in the tree.

We could also allow a world to be designated "do not allow forks" or "if locked, do not allow downloads by anyone but the user holding the lock".  The latter would be somewhat looser than "only allow lock by user in private group, and do not allow downloads by anyone but the user holding the lock".

I agree with the suggestion of the Subversion "beta".  Personally I think we will encounter issues with that route but it's better to try it and give it a chance.

So we need either:
1) SVN Hosting, which is available free for Open Source projects from folks like Google and SourceForge, but I don't think this qualifies as an Open Source "project" per say; we're just looking for a versioned/managed file drop essentially.  The pay versions range from $4/month to over $50/month depending on how many GB of data, how many distinct modules (we may be able to fit it all in one), and how many distinct users (we may need a lot of those).
2) a server own/controlled by one of us on which we can install SVN, get it set up, etc.  This has other costs and it would help to have someone who has real experience administering SVN (anyone?).

PTTG, you mentioned that you have web space, but I'm pretty vague on the details.  Can you give us more info?

Thanks,
Keith

Ok, assuming y'all haven't already moved forward with this project (meaning some kind of online repository of worlds allowing check-out and check-in), I would like to volunteer my services as time permits.  For what it's worth, I'm a professional web application programmer, and very interested in Dwarf Fortress.

Using SVN or something would be interesting, but you'll probably just want a web application.  If I'm wrong and SVN fits, by all means go ahead with that.

We need three things to make this happen:

1) Web Server with:
- adequate disk space
- support for some dynamic web language (ASP.NET, PHP, ColdFusion, etc)
- (probably) support for some database system (MSSQL, MySQL, etc)
- preferably, some sort of backup scheme so the whole thing doesn't get wiped because a hard disk dies

2) Clear statement of what "the system" should do
- who will use the system? (think user groups; e.g. "anyone" and "moderators")
- what users in each of these groups do? (e.g. "anyone" might check out or check in a world, whereas only a moderator could start a new world or "rollback" a world where the most recent check-in is inappropriate)
- what data do we need to track? (e.g. there will be any number of "world" objects, each of which has any number of "check-ins" representing state at a particular point in time; etc, more on this a bit later)

3) Web/Database programmer to:
- make sure the requirements of what "the system" should do are clear
- create the database and web interface that satisfy those requirements, and put those on the web server
- coordinate the testing effort to make sure the result is more or less un-buggy and satisfying to the clients (that would be y'all)

Of course, you'll also need community interest for this to have any real meaning (and to do moderating, etc), but it sounds like you have that.

---

So, PTTG, you've mentioned having some storage available; do you have something that would satisfy 1) ?  If not, sufficient hosting could probably be procured for $20/month or less but that would depend on how many people are pulling these files down at once and how many total files y'all want it to support.

As to 3), it's up to y'all but I'll be happy to do it as long as the requirements stay sane.

Which brings us to 2).  Here's my guesses based on what you've said thus far:

User roles and what they do
---
Normal User

- creates a username/password account, similar to how you create an account for this forum
-- account creation could be made contingent on moderator "approval", but this adds complexity both in the code and in the real-world process of waiting for a mod to get around to it

- can "check-out" any available world
-- downloads the latest file for that world
-- makes that world unavailable for further check-outs
-- can limit the number of worlds a particular user has checked-out

- can "check-in" any world they have checked out
-- uploads the file for that world
-- enters additional info like in-game year and description of what happened
-- makes that world available for further check-outs
-- could make the actual "available" status wait until a mod can take a look to make sure the check-in is legit, but again this might bog down the process unnecessarily

- can download a copy of any "check-in" ever uploaded, with the understanding that they cannot then check that file back into the world from which it came


Moderator

- creates a username/password account, similar to how you create an account for this forum
-- account will not function as a "Moderator" account unless and until another moderator flags the account as such (the programmer would set up the initial set of moderators)

- can do anything a normal user can do

- can create a brand new world
-- uploads the initial file (either right after world_gen or whatever, doesn't matter)
-- enters a description

- can "clone" a world
-- picks any check-in from any world, which is copied to the new world (just that one check-in, none of the previous or subsequent ones for that world)
-- enters a description

- can delete a world
-- deletes all check-ins associated with that world, and the world disappears from the list forever
-- intended for dealing with junk data

- can "rollback" a world to a previous check-in
-- deletes all check-ins after the selected check-in
-- intended for dealing with junk check-ins


Data to track:
---
World
- Name
- Description
- Date Created
- who has it checked out (if anyone)
- Compatible DF version(s)
- who uploaded it
- 1 or more "check-ins"


World Check In
- World to which it belongs
- Zip file containing what is necessary to play it
- Date of upload
- In-game Year
- coordinates of dwarf fortress if played in dwarf mode (needed?)
- who uploaded it
- comments from uploader



Ok, I'm sure I'm missing stuff, but there it is.

Some things to think about are:
- security; possible viruses in zip files from malicious users?
- do you want to restrict certain worlds to only allow check-outs from specific users (for a succession game or whatever)?

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Keith