Turn completion in RSS/XML

[chipv]

Sorry if this has already been asked for, but 101 pages of suggestions and nothing comes up in the search results...
I've just joined CC, but after reading through some of the forum posts wanted to modify/come up with a Gadget/GM script
to return info saying when a turn had been completed by anyone - at the moment you still have to keep refreshing if you
want to see if anyone has taken a turn unless it's the person just before you.
I'm aware of the gadgets/GM scripts/FF extensions currently available for notifications but they are limited by the scope of info in the RSS.

I notice there is a brief description of an upcoming Game Log/Game History in XML format which probably covers this so apologies in advance,
but here goes anyway:

Put Turn completion in the RSS feed or if there is a GAME XML

• Current RSS feed only gives indication about your turn in a game and not anyone else's turn in that game

Specifics:

• RSS feed could indicate something like "Player xxx has completed turn at 18:06:04" or even "Last turn completed at 18:06:04"
  and optionally include the turn log.The URL can remain the same, of course.
  This shouldn't be a problem from a database point of view and I think should be reasonably trivial

This will improve the following aspects of the site:

• Applications/GM scripts can parse this info and produce alerts/notifiers,analysers etc that are turn-based.
  At the moment there are only round based alerts (tells you when it's your turn or a new round has begun)

[chipv]

Is this the right forum for this suggestion or is it just rubbish?

[Thezzaruz]

It's the right place to start.

[yeti_c]

I suspect that your main problem is that the RSS feeds aren't updated as often as is necessary for this to happen...

I believe - but don't quote me on this - that it updates every 5 minutes.

C.

[chipv]

Thanks, everyone.

5 mins is more than sufficient, a little suprising though considering you're actually allowed
24 hours for your turn.

Taking speed games out of the equation, from my hideously limited experience, the
average turn takes several hours. The games I have started playing in have
players from several timezones so not that surprising.

So the RSS feed only needs to be updated at worst every 24 hours.
A daily RSS feed for turn based info is not great of course.

Obviously you can get quick players and people who are playing at roughly the same time
so I guess an hour is more than sufficient or whatever is manageable on the servers.

I've seen plenty of hourly RSS feeds with huge amounts of info on them so I think this ought to
be do-able especially as there is very little extra code to write as the turn completion data must have already
been calculated to determine whether or not it is actually your turn. The only question would then be
how much (if any) extra load on the servers this frequency of XML generation would generate.
I guess not much, depending on the current refresh rate for the current RSS feed.

How do I get more info on the current RSS feed?
(Like composition and frequency).

Thanks for the answers and thanks in advance for any more.

[chipv]

I have an alternative to suggest, having thought about this a bit more.

Since there is a separate RSS feed per player, it is possible to collect them all and
genereate turn based notifiers that way. The problem then is collecting the userids.
A GM script that sees the game pages could do it, but that's not good enough because it would
need to read the game page at some point, so how about putting the userids in the RSS feed instead?

This is a one-off shot for the RSS output and therefore does not need any extra refreshing as that's done
in the individual RSS feeds.

Thanks in advance

[lackattack]

Our current RSS feed has one entry per game. But you are taking about having an entry for an event (turn completion). I don't think it makes sense to mix games with events... we should choose one or the other. How would you indicate turn completion in the feed if we stick with game entries?

[chipv]

Hi, lackattack, delighted to hear a response!

Currently each item in the RSS feed looks like this:

<item>
<title>Game 9999999 Round 9 - WAITING (09hrs 9min 9sec remaining)</title>
<link>http://www.conquerclub.com/game.php?game=9999999</link>
<guid isPermaLink="false">www.conquerclub.com#myusername#999999</guid>
</item>

So we have got access to game #, round # status (=READY/WAITING/ELIIMINATED), time to go,
my username.

What would be nice is an addition of an extra tag like this:
<players>101010,202020,303030...</players>

where the list is ordered by turn order and these are user_id.

This would enable a notifier to go through the list for the order and poll each individual RSS feed thereby
working out whose turn it is etc. It is of course possible to miss a turn if the local timer isn't fine enough
which is why I was asking for a turn completed event addition to the RSS feed, but that is extra work.

e.g.

<lastplayer>user_id finished at (some timestamp or 30mins ago)</lastplayer>

Thanks for the response!

[chipv]

Well, I've gone ahead and written a GM script that does what I want so I guess there's
no need for this suggestion as there are other ways to extricate the information.

If any of the mods want to give it a test run, feel free to contact me.

On any conqueror page, it does a scan for new turns and puts all your games in the left sidebar under Personal Menu
telling you who plays next and exactly what the last player did with quick links on them.
Also on any web page , it will do a scan and alert you with details of the latest turn taken
if it is a new turn taken.

I'm using it at the moment and I'm getting details of every move regardless of what web page
I'm on.

Example:

Game 238762346
Next Player: sdfdsklj
Last Turn:
salkdcasd deployed 3 armies on Northwest Territory
salkdcasd attacked Alaska from Northwest Territory and conquered it from sdhfsdk#
salkdcasd gets a card
salkdcasd now has 4 cards

(Rank Icons are displayed and there are links back to game and profiles)

At the moment it needs autologin and I guess there are a lot of things that can de modified and added
but it's really only for people like me who want to see every turn.

I guess it doesn't sound much so if someone can take a look, they can say whether they think it might be useful, I guess.

Regardless, I think there is no need for the original suggestion to stand so consider it retracted and thanks for the repsonses.

Thanks

[yeti_c]

Sounds sweet...

Can I suggest you create a new post in the "plugins & addons" forum...

viewforum.php?f=59

Also - if you're looking for a place to upload your scripts then I think you should visit

www.userscripts.org

C.

[t-o-m]

sounds good,
this is basically a bump post because i think it needs bumping

[chipv]

Thanks for the responses. Now for feedback..

I've just uploaded the script and am going to post on the Plugins forum shortly and we'll see what happens.

Thanks again for all the nice responses!