Author: Fizzer

Announcing WarLight 1.5

WarLight will be going down on Friday, July 1st at 6am PDT (1pm GMT) to add new features. If all goes well, it should only be down for about 20 minutes. Please plan accordingly for any fast games or single player games that may get interrupted during this time.

During this time, WarLight will be upgraded to v1.05.0. This blog post contains a summary of what’s changing.

Vacation Mode

WarLight will let you mark yourself as “on vacation.” This feature helps players avoid getting booted in times when they’re going to be away from WarLight for a while.

Simply visit the Settings tab right before you leave on vacation and turn on Vacation Mode. While in this mode, WarLight will display a small “V” next to your name to let other players know you’re on vacation. It will also prevent you from being booted from most games. Note, however, that game creators have the option of disabling vacations in their game. In these games, you’ll still be bootable, so be sure to check the game settings.

Further, vacations aren’t honored in real-time games either. Real-time games are meant to be played in a single sitting, so going on vacation doesn’t really make sense.

To prevent abuse, each player is limited to 5 vacations per year and each vacation can last up to 10 days. If you’re gone longer than 10 days, you can extend your vacation. You can extend your vacation to up to 10 days from the current date, so you’d have to visit the website while on vacation.

Auto-boot with Banking Boot Times

In order to support vacations, the auto-booter had to be improved to be smarter about when to check games for bootability. As a result of this improvement, it also made it possible to support auto-boot in conjunction with banking boot times. This are two features which previously could not be combined – now they can!

Expired Ladder Games are easier to see

The website now shows (Expired) next to games that are more than 3 months old. This makes it easier to see which games are affecting your rating.

Preparation for Mobile Client

As mentioned in the previous blog post, this release contains code to support the upcoming iPhone and Android versions of WarLight. Stay tuned for the preview!

Misc Changes

– The website recieved some style updates.
– When using the Control+Click deploy method, starting to issue an attack now closes the deployment slider.
– When your teammates change orders, the game no longer shows the wait dialog.
– Fixed a bug that caused failed attacks to show the wrong attacking armies if you watched the attack, then navigated back and re-watched the same attack immediately after.
– The lobby now shows a string indicating your state in a game.
– Maps are now served up from a CDN so they download faster.

WarLight for iPhone and Android!

It’s time for a big announcement! I’ve been hard at work on making a mobile version of WarLight, which will first target iPhone and then later Android devices.

The mobile client will be a native app offered on the Apple App Store and the Android Market. This will be a full equivalent to the Flash client in that you can play the exact same multi-player games as you can on your computer, however the UI is completely re-worked to adapt to being played from a phone. This means it’s not a scaled-back version of WarLight — it supports all of the settings and all maps! Before you get too excited though, know that it’s not done yet — see below for a timeline.

WarLight is a perfect game for mobile devices due to its asynchronous nature. Unlike other multi-player games where you have to be online at the same time as your opponents, WarLight allows you to take your phone out of your pocket whenever you have a free moment, enter your orders, and put it right back. I believe the mobile platform will only get more important as time goes on, as fewer and fewer people own desktop PCs. And WarLight is a great fit for this environment. My goal is to put WarLight on as many devices as possible, so you can play no matter where you are.

Tablets

I know many of you at this point are wondering if this mobile client will run on your iPad or Android Tablet. The short answer is yes – it will run as an iPad or Android Tablet app. However, it’s important to understand that the UI is designed to be used from a phone.

I do recognize that tablets are also a growing market, and I do believe that WarLight is a fabulous game for tablets as it lends itself very well to a touch interface. In the future I hope to build a UI that�s custom-tailored to fit the tablet form factor. However, this release is focused on phones. The fact that it happens to also run on tablets like the iPad is just a free bonus.

Preliminary Timeline

As stated above, the mobile client is still a work-in-progress. I’ve been working on it in secret for a long time, and I’m finally within reach of having a “preview” version that I can share with the purpose of getting feedback. This is the first mobile app I’ve ever made, so I expect it to be a learning process with many iterations. For this reason, the first previews will be member-only. If you’re a WarLight member, you don’t need to do anything extra to sign up for the betas – just keep an eye on the blog.

– 1.05: The first step is to get WarLight 1.05 out (hopefully this week). This will this contains all of the changes to the server code needed to support the mobile client. For example, the format that WarLight stores maps internally is changing a lot so that mobile devices can render them quickly.

– Preview: After 1.05 is out, there’s at least a few weeks of work still left before the first mobile client release: the preview. The preview will have just enough features to play multi-player games and chat in them.

– Alpha: After the preview, I’ll begin working on the alpha. The alpha will add single-player support, as well as a more complete multi-player experience including things like the ability to see history, game settings, the players window, nudge/boot window, etc.

– Beta: The beta will allow creating games, as well as the lobby’s add/remove players feature. The beta period will focus on bug fixing, polish and enhancing usability.

– Release: The mobile client is pushed to the Apple App Store and Android Market.

– Post-release: Tournaments are a lower priority and won’t make it until after the initial release. Also, things on the website (such as reading and posting on forums, viewing and joining the ladders) are also a lower priority since they can already be accomplished through a device’s web browser. However, it’s nice to have them all eventually added to the app so it becomes a one-stop shop.

Technical Details

Currently, the mobile client supports the My Games page, the lobby page, sign in, sign out, sign up, forgot password and the ability to render any map with panning/scrolling/zooming. All that’s left to add for the preview is the ability to deploy armies, issue attacks, commit orders, pick territories, and play cards.

It will run on Android Devices 2.1 and up and all iPhones. As a benchmark, I’ve been testing the Big USA map on a first-generation iPhone. Since the Big USA map is so large, and the first-generation iPhone is so old, this is what I consider the worst case scenario. Anything else should run swimmingly performance-wise.

To accomplish this, the maps are rendered using OpenGL to get the maximum amount of performance out of each device. All of the UI that doesn’t involve interacting with the map is handled with the native UI controls on each platform. (buttons, switches, etc.) I really like this mixed approach since it simultaneously allows for fast rendering you get with OpenGL, but avoids having to re-implement all of the native UI controls like many fully-OpenGL apps do.

One of the biggest hurdles was maintaining a single code-base for all of the clients. Most games that are written on multiple platforms / mobile devices end up doing re-writes of their code. I’d be willing to do a one-time re-write of WarLight’s code if I had to, but what I can’t do is actively maintain many copies of the code. I simply don’t have the time to fix every bug multiple times and add every feature multiple times. Combine this with all of the features I plan to add to WarLight down the road, and it’s clear I need a cross-platform solution. I’ll talk more about this in future blog posts.

Another hurdle was automated testing. I’ve talked a little bit about this on the blog before – I’m a huge fan of automated testing and WarLight would simply not be possible for a single person to do with manual testing. The number of combinations of game settings and situations is mind-boggling, and trying to manually test each of these before every release would make releasing extremely expensive.

Every time I add a feature, I add a slew of automated tests that test the feature in every significant way I can think of. Similarly, anytime a bug is found, a test gets created that reproduces the bug before the bug is fixed. These tests live forever and they all get run before any WarLight release happens. This ensures that bugs don’t come back (regressions).

The mobile client is no exception. I’ve been writing automated tests for the mobile client from the very beginning as I develop each feature for it. These tests take work to create and maintain, but they really pay off in the long run as they allow for rapid releases.

Once the preview is out, I hope to return back to a regular release schedule of once every 2-3 weeks. This is how I prefer to operate — the last few updates have been much slower because I was splitting my time between the mobile client and traditional releases. These days will soon be behind us — I’m eagerly looking forward to being able to rapidly add new features to the WarLight!

Stay tuned to the blog for more updates.

Announcing WarLight 1.4

WarLight will be going down on Wednesday, May 25th at 11pm PDT (6am GMT) for up to 1 hour. Please plan accordingly for any fast games or single player games that may get interrupted during this 1 hour window.

During this time, WarLight will be upgraded to v1.04.0. This blog post contains a summary of what’s changing.

Ladder Graphs and Arrows

When viewing a player or team’s ladder information, WarLight now shows you a graph of their previous rank and rating:

Further, all of the ladder pages now show small arrows that indicate the movement over the past week:

Profile Additions

The little speed graphs on the left side of profile pages received a small addition. It’s now split between real-time games and multi-day games. Additionally, the multi-day game graph now has a new section for turns that took longer than a week.

The Gold Stars that you can earn by completing single player levels quickly are also now shown on your profile.

Percentage Attacks

When issuing an attack, you can issue them in raw army numbers or by percentage. A small change is being made to the way that percentage attacks work.

Previously, attacks by percentage were calculated based off of the number of armies on the source territory. Now, attacks by percentage are calculated based off the number of armies that are available to attack with.

Let’s look at an example. Say you have 21 armies on Brazil and 21 armies on Argentina. Say you transfer 20 armies from Argentina to Brazil, and then attack Nigeria from Brazil with 50%.

When the attack happens, Brazil has 41 armies, but only 20 of them can attack (the other 20 already moved since they came from Argentina). In the old behavior, WarLight would calculate 50% of 41 and attack with all 20 armies. In the new behavior, WarLight will take 50% of the armies that are available to attack, and attack with 10.

Round Robin Tournament Limits

When creating a round robin tournament, tournament creators now have the option to specify how many teams/players will be allowed to join the tournament. Of course, there’s still a “Start Tournament” button, so this number really specifies the maximum number of players. When the tournament is full, it will automatically start as well, which relieves the tournament creator from having to click the start button.

While this is only a minor convenience for non-team tournaments, this fixes a key problem that existed for team round robin tournaments. Since the tournament now has a maximum size, it can help guide players into forming even teams. Since the tournament can’t start with uneven teams, this makes it significantly easier to get team round robin tournaments up and running.

Ladder Matchmaking Tweaks

The ladder’s matchmaking algorithm has to walk a fine line. If it tries to be too selective in the matches it creates, some people will complain that they aren’t getting as many games as they’d like. Conversely, if it’s less selective, some people complain about who their opponents are. I’m trying to tweak it only in ways that logically make sense, and to make sure I’m not overcorrecting it one way or the other.

The ladder has eligibility requirements for two players or teams to be matched against each other. For example, they can’t currently be playing each other, have just finished a game with each other, or have had a match created against each other in the last 3 games.

The first change being made is that the ladder eligibility requirements now go both ways. Teams or players won’t be matched with someone, even if they meet the requirements, if that other person doesn’t meet the requirements back at them. This is a logical change that will help bring some stability to the matchmaking algorithm.

Since this will cause some people to receive fewer games than before, the ladder range is also being increased to counteract this. The range the ladder looks at has been increased from 25% to 30%.

Even with this increase, I expect some people will have stagnated games in the short-term due to this new requirement. However, as a few more games finish, this will pass and everything should return to the same quantity of games it was at before, but the quality of opponents should be much higher (i.e. fewer repeats and more diversity.)

Bug Fixes

– Fixed bugs around retired ladder games.
– Fixed a bug that caused the “A” hotkey, when used to skip watching the latest turn, to make the game think you hadn’t watched the latest turn and sometimes revert back to the watching state (such as when exiting history.)
– Fixed a bug that was causing the spy’s card “Can spy on Neutral” flag to not obey templates.
– Fixed a bug that was causing the team-size box to not obey templates.
– Sorting the My Games page by Game Name now does a case-insensitive sort.
– Fixed a bug that was causing stroke opacity to be inconsistent on some maps.
– Fixed a bug that caused the Send Feedback window text to not be selectable with the mouse.
– Fixed a bug that caused errors if you went too far back into the “All Forum Posts” archives.
– Fixed a bug that sometimes caused an error when a host changes the invited players from the lobby screen.

Announcing WarLight 1.3

WarLight will be going down on Saturday, April 30th at 1am PDT (8am GMT) for up to 30 minutes. Please plan accordingly for any fast games or single player games that may get interrupted during this 30-minute window.

During this time, WarLight will be upgraded to v1.03.0. This blog post contains a summary of what’s changing. This is a smaller release than normal, as I’m simultaneously working on a bigger release that won’t be done for a while.

Cyclic Move Order

Members have a new setting they can set on their games: the Move Order. This setting controls the sequence that orders are carried out within each turn. The default is set to Random, which is how all the games work today — i.e. you never know if your first attack will happen before or after your opponents, since it’s determined randomly for each turn.

If this setting is changed to Cycle, then players will take turns getting first move. In this mode, you can figure out whether or not your first attack will happen before or after your opponent’s first attack. The first turn of a game is randomized just as it would be in the random move order that we’re all used to, but subsequent turns just cycle through that same order. For example: ABCD becomes BCDA for the next turn, followed by CDAB, and finally DABC before starting back at ABCD.

This is mostly designed for 1 v 1 games, in which one player to get first move on all evened numbered turns while the other player gets first move on all of the odd numbered turns.

One twist is that you can’t see the cycle for the game anywhere. You must deduce it by observing the sequence that attack orders happen in. This means that if you see an opponent attack happen before your first attack, then you know the cycle and will be able to know whether or not your first attack will happen before your opponent’s first attack.

This setting will be considered for the ladders in the future.

Gold Stars

Gold Stars are now awarded for each of the single-player levels if you can complete them in low turn times. These don’t do anything except look pretty, but they give you something else to shoot for when going through the single player levels. Stars are awarded for completing:

– Level 1 in 6 turns
– Level 2 in 14 or fewer turns
– Level 3 in 19 or fewer turns
– Europe challenge in 18 or fewer turns
– Crazy challenge in 22 or fewer turns
– Insane challenge in 28 or fewer turns

Map Feedback

In an effort to increase the quality of maps, players can now submit feedback on maps directly to the map creators. This is a great way to report any bugs you find in a map, or just to let a map creator know that you really enjoy their map.

To do this, from the game screen, click the Settings button, View Map, Send Feedback. This can also be done on the Create Game screen if you click Preview Map and then Send Feedback.

New Strategic 2 v 2 Settings

As mentioned in the previous blog post, the settings for the 2 v 2 ladder are being tweaked so that players now start with two territories each instead of one.

Ladder History

In this release, WarLight will begin keeping a history of each player/team’s ladder rating and rank changes over time. This means WarLight will be able to show a graph of your rank/rating, or helpful indicators showing whether players have been rising or falling.

While these features aren’t coming in this release, at least it will be tracking history so that when these features are eventually added, they’ll have data going back to now.

Misc Changes

– Player’s profiles now show what percentage of their games are real-time versus multi-day.
– When spectating a game that’s finished, the “Watch turn” phase will now be skipped automatically.
– Added a player’s best ladder rank to their profile page.
– Ladder player’s best rank is now shown even after they leave the ladder.
– The ladder’s rank-changed email now only sends a maximum of once per day.
– The ladder matchmaking algorithm has been tweaked to help pair you with players you have not played before.
– All tournaments must now be multi-day.
– When viewing a forum thread, the forum name is now displayed in the “Go back” link above it.
– The top-left corner label now says “Game start” in place of “Turn 0”
– Players are now given an alert if they try to submit an order delay card as their last order, since it would be a waste of the card.
– WarLight now uses a CDN to reduce bandwidth costs.
– Fixed a bug that occurs when a player you’re spying on gets a territory gifted to them.
– Fixed a bug that caused the Chat text box to not appear when joining an open tournament.
– Fixed a bug that caused open tournaments you created to show “Unread Chat Messages”
– Fixed a bug that, when creating a game, caused the auto-boot drop down to stay disabled if you go back and disable banking boot times.

New 2 v 2 Ladder Settings

Players recently voted on new 2v2 ladder settings (where each player is given two territories instead of one to start) in this thread. The results are in!

– 80% approve of the new settings
– 10% rejected the new settings
– 10% don’t care

Overwhelmingly, most of you like the new settings. Therefore, these new settings will go live in the next WarLight release, which will be v1.3. As is policy, the new settings won’t take effect for at least a week from the date of this announcement, so players have time to practice with the new settings before they go into effect.

You can view the new settings (or create games with them) with these links: multi-player, single-player

WarLight as a candidate to the Google AI Challenge

There has been some talk of WarLight being a candidate for the next Google AI Challenge. For those not familiar with the Google AI Challenge, the GAIC is a competition where software engineers write a bot to play a game for them. They then upload their bot into the GAIC website which matches their AI against everyone else’s. It’s a lot of fun – they’ve featured other popular games such as Galcon and the Tron game, which is a bit like the old snake games.

To prepare for WarLight as a candidate, I threw together a prototype of a framework that can run a WarLight AI Challenge. This contains everything you need to write and run a WarLight AI on your own computer, completely separate from the WarLight servers.

I appreciate any feedback on this prototype – shoot me an email at fizzer@warlight.net!

Game Settings

WarLight is a very flexible engine that supports many different variations and settings. For this prototype, I selected settings that I think would make for a good AI challenge. I chose these settings both to make the game as fair as possible, as well as making it as easy as possible to write an AI.

Map

I chose the Double Earth map for this prototype, since it’s symmetrical and therefore can be completely fair to both parties. For the initial territory layout, I pick three random territories from the top earth and give these to one AI, and give the same three from the lower world to the other AI. The rest of the territories start out as neutral 2s.

Most strategic WarLight games let players choose where they start. This is entirely plausible for the AI Challenge as well, however I decided that a random (but mirroed) approach was better simply because it makes it easier to write an AI. Having to write code to determine where to start is a fun AI challenge itself, but doing this adds more syntax to the AI language and is just one more thing you need to learn and write before you can have a working AI. If the GAIC sponsors want this turned back on it can be.

Cards

For those unfamiliar, WarLight contains a dozen different types of cards that have a variety of effects on the game. I decided for the AI Challenge that cards should be left out, mostly because they add more syntax to the AI language and, like above, increase the base knowledge you need to learn to write an AI.

Fog

Fog is the WarLight feature that controls whether or not you can see the entire map or just what’s next to you. Whether or not to include fog in an AI challenge is an interesting decision that I thought a lot about. Ultimately I decided to turn it on, since it’s a feature unlike things that the GAIC has done before. If you’d like to try it without fog, you can turn it off in the downloaded source on line 34 that says “useFog: true”

Randomness

WarLight’s rules do contain some randomness, which enhances the game experience for human players. However, for an AI challenge, it may be beneficial to remove the use of the random number generator. There are four places that Warlight uses the RNG: distribution, combat, rounding, and move order. Two of these have already been removed from the prototype, and the other two could also be eliminated if we wanted to get rid of the RNG completely.

– Distribution: As mentioned above, bots don’t get to choose where they start so the normal randomness that affects strategic 1 v 1 games during distribution has already been removed for this AI challenge.

– Combat: WarLight’s main combat rules contain some use of the RNG. WarLight already contains a slider that allows you to control how much you want the RNG to affect your game. For the AI challenge, I have set this slider to 0, which eliminates this use of the RNG. If you want to turn it back on, you can do so in the downloaded source on line 33 that says “luckModifier: 0”

– Rounding: WarLight uses random rounding, where 0.4 has a 40% chance of being rounded up and a 60% chance of being rounded down. This is left turned on in the prototype, however if the GAIC sponsors wish, we could change this to a straight round to eliminate this use of the RNG.

– Move order: WarLight randomizes the order that players move within a turn. Although this does have an effect on the game, it’s typically not the deciding factor. Nevertheless, if the GAIC sponsors wish, we can change this to order based on a predictable heuristic, such as alternating turns or giving first move to the player with fewer armies or something like this.

How to Write an AI

For those unfamiliar with GAIC, this prototype uses standard in/out to communicate with bots. This means you can write your bot in any language that can print to and read from the console. The fastest way to get started is to take a look at the C# starter pack included in the downloadable below as it contains a fully functional (although not incredibly smart) AI.

At Startup: The Map

WarLight maps are obviously a graph. When your AI is started, the first thing it will do is read the map from standard-in. The first line is simply the word “Map” informing you that a map is coming up.

After that, your AI will read a series of lines starting with TerritoryDefinition. For example:

TerritoryDefinition 1 SolomonIslandsN 48 8
TerritoryDefinition 2 St.PetersburgN 87 4 11 110 111 104
TerritoryDefinition 3 PeruN 125 96 147 64
TerritoryDefinition 4 PermN 110 92 2 87 70
TerritoryDefinition 5 MyanmarN 26 29 49 119
TerritoryDefinition 6 PanamaN 147 25
TerritoryDefinition 7 ShanghaiN 50 26 151 114

Territory definition arguments:
– Argument 0: The word TerritoryDefinition
– Argument 1: The ID of this territory
– Argument 2: The name of the territory with spaces stripped out. This is not used by your AI, but it assists in debugging as knowing the name of the territory makes it easier to locate on a map.
– Argument 3+: The IDs of the territories that this territory connects to.

After reading territories, your AI will be fed a series of lines starting with BonusDefinition. For example:

BonusDefinition 5 CentralRussiaN 83 45 120 105 75 137 150
BonusDefinition 4 AustraliaN 27 122 14 135 134 12 91 15
BonusDefinition 6 EastRussiaN 136 115 66 18 46 103 65 129 72 149
BonusDefinition 6 EuropeN 54 51 109 34 10 80 11 101 95
BonusDefinition 4 MiddleEastN 138 52 21 53 43 19

Bonus definition arguments:
– Argument 0: The word BonusDefinition
– Argument 1: The number of armies this bonus is worth if you control all of its territories
– Argument 2: The name of the bonus. This is not used by your AI, but it assists in debugging as knowing the name of the bonus makes it easier to locate on a map.
– Argument 3+: The IDs of the territories that make up this bonus.

After the bonuses, your AI will be fed a line that says “EndMap” and nothing else. This notifies you to stop reading the map and to get ready to start the first turn of the game.

Each Turn: The Standing

In your main game loop, first read a line that will say either “GameOver” or “Turn #” where # is the turn number. Upon reading GameOver, you should obviously exit your process.

If you don’t see GameOver, you should start receiving a game “standing.” A standing is the state of the board at one point in time – it tells you who controls each territory and how many armies on are on it.

Territory 198 ownedBy Neutral withArmies 1
Territory 199 ownedBy Neutral withArmies 2
Territory 200 ownedBy You withArmies 5
Territory 209 ownedBy Neutral withArmies 2
Territory 214 ownedBy You withArmies 5

Territory arguments:
– Argument 0: The word “Territory”
– Argument 1: The territory ID
– Argument 2: The word “ownedBy”
– Argument 3: Either “You”, “Neutral” or “Opponent”
– Argument 4: The word “withArmies”
– Argument 5: The number of armies on this territory

Keep reading territories until you read the word “EndStanding” alone on a line.

Each Turn: Send Your Orders

After reading the standing, it’s time to execute your custom AI logic! As we’ve removed cards, the only thing your AI needs to issue are Deploy orders and AttackTransfer orders, which is what can order armies to attack or transfer from one territory to an adjacent one.

You should print out orders to standard out like this:

Deploy 4 on 5
Deploy 1 on 112
AttackTransfer 4 from 5 to 29
AttackTransfer 3 from 5 to 119
AttackTransfer 8 from 26 to 119
end

Deploy arguments:
– Argument 0: The word “Deploy”
– Argument 1: The number of armies you’re deploying
– Argument 2: The word “on”
– Argument 3: The territory ID you’re deploying on

AttackTransfer arguments:
– Argument 0: The word “AttackTransfer”
– Argument 1: The number of armies to attack or transfer
– Argument 2: The word “from”
– Argument 3: The territory ID to attack or transfer from
– Argument 4: The word “to”
– Argument 5: The territory ID to attack or transfer to

Finally, after issuing all of your orders, simply print out “end” to signal that you’re done. That’s all there is to it!

How to run your AI

The downloadable below contains an executable named WarLightAIChallenge.exe. Simply run this with two arguments that point at the bots you wish to execute. For example, to have the included starter pack fight itself on Windows, run: (note: Windows users must have .net 4.0 installed)

WarLightAIChallenge.exe StarterPack.exe StarerPack.exe

On OSX or Linux, run it in Mono 2.8 or higher:

mono WarLightAIChallenge.exe StarterPack.exe StarerPack.exe

Visualizer

For this prototype, I have not yet written a visualizer. This means that there’s no provided app that lets you view your game data in a graphical format to easily see what’s going on. If anyone writes one and is willing to share, send me an e-mail and I’ll post it here.

Downloads

Download Here

This package contains:
– StarterPack source code
– StarterPack pre-compiled binary
– AI runner source code (named WarLightAIChallenge)
– AI runner pre-compiled binary (named WarLightAIChallenge.exe)

If you run into any problems or have any comments, please send me an email at fizzer@warlight.net.

The Impaller versus The World

I’m pleased to announce a special WarLight event called The Impaller versus The World! This is a public 1v1 WarLight game that anyone can participate in.

This game is a Strategic 1 v 1 game where one side of the game will be played by The Impaller, who’s one of WarLight’s best players, and the other side is played by you! Everyone in the WarLight community can vote on what move to make in the game, and the highest voted option will be carried out in the game.

This game’s primary purpose it to serve as a learning exercise — who wins isn’t important. The game will take two turns every week – one every Tuesday and another every Friday. Check the forum to follow along with the game, read strategies, share your strategy, and of course, vote!

The voting uses SnappyVote.com, which has a cool voting system that doesn’t require you to pick a single option. Rather, you can rate each option with a star rating between 0 and 5 stars. This means that if there are two options you can’t decide between (or that are very similar), you don’t need to decide between them – you can just put both of them at 5 stars.

Troll has agreed to moderate the game. Every Tuesday and Friday, he will create a forum post with instructions on how to vote. Troll will create several options to vote for, but feel free to suggest your own in the forum thread if what you really want to do is missing from the list.

Important: Be sure not to post your strategies or talk about the game anywhere except the official forum threads. The Impaller knows that he’s forbidden from reading the clearly marked threads, but if you talk about the game somewhere else he may accidentally come across it.

The game begins today! The first step is to do territory selection. Here’s the board we have to start with (click to enlarge):

Head over to this forum post to cast your votes!

Create WarLight Games Programmatically

WarLight now supports the ability to create multi-player games programmatically via an API. This opens up a wealth of new possibilities for application writers, such as creating custom WarLight tournaments or ladders.

Of course, it’s always been possible to create custom tournaments or ladders manually, but this API allows you to write a system that will automate this process. This blog post describes how to write an automated system like this.

Invite Tokens

To invite players to a game via the API, you must get each participating player’s invite token or e-mail address. It’s preferable to use invite tokens over e-mail addresses, since players may be reluctant to share their e-mail addresses. However, inviting by e-mail address is provided as an option for situations where you know everyone’s e-mail, such as setting up a tournament with friends or co-workers.

Players can get their invite token by visiting this url: http://warlight.net/InviteToken.aspx. Incidentally, this is the same number as what’s displayed in the address bar when looking at a player’s profile. So it’s easy to get someone’s invite token from a forum post, if you’re handling adding players to your system manually.

After getting a player’s invite token, you can pass it to the ValidateInviteToken API. This API tells you whether an invite token is valid, which ensures you that you will be able to invite them to a game. Calling VaidateInviteToken is not strictly necessary to invite players to a game, however it’s handy if you want to know up-front whether or not it’s valid rather than waiting for the game creation to fail later.

You can call ValidateInviteToken with a URL like this: http://warlight.net/API/ValidateInviteToken.aspx?Token=[token].

Creating the Games

Once you’ve got all your invite tokens, you can divide them up into games according to whatever logic you’re trying to achieve. To create a game, call the CreateGame API. You can specify the game settings, game name, boot times, and the players you’re inviting.

When calling http://warlight.net/API/CreateGame.aspx, you should POST xml that contains the details about the game you’re creating. Here’s an example:

 <createGame>
	<hostEmail>your@email.com</hostEmail>
	<hostPassword>yourPassword</hostPassword>
	<templateID>1234</templateID>
	<gameName>Game name here (max 50 chars)</gameName>
	<personalMessage>Description to include with the game.
                   (Max 1024 characters)</personalMessage>
	<realTime>false</realTime>
	<voteBootTimeInMinutes>Never</voteBootTimeInMinutes>
	<directBootTimeInMinutes>2880</directBootTimeInMinutes>
	<autoBootTimeInMinutes>4320</autoBootTimeInMinutes>
	<practiceGame>false</practiceGame>
	
	<invite>
		<player token="player1@email.com" team="None" />
		<player token="player2@email.com" team="None" />
		<player token="123456789" team="None" />
		<player token="player4@email.com" team="None" />
	</invite>
 </createGame>
  • hostEmail / hostPassword: These elements identify you. The game will be recorded as created by you.
  • templateID: Specifies the ID of a template that you create through the normal game GUI. You can either use a built-in template or you can create your own. It does not matter if you create it as a single-player or multi-player template.
  • gameName: This will show up as the name of the game. Maximum 50 characters.
  • personalMessage: This will show up in the Lobby as well as the Settings. Maximum 1024 characters.
  • realTime: True for real-time game, false for a multi-day game. This is typically false.
  • voteBootTimeInMinutes / directBootTimeInMinutes / autoBootTimeInMinutes: These define the boot times for the game. 2880 is 2 days, 4320 is 3 days.
  • practiceGame: True for a practice game, false for a ranked game.
  • invite: This node defines the players that will be invited. It consists of ‘player’ elements, each of which contains a ‘token’ attribute and a ‘team’ attribute:
    • player team: This can be the string ‘None’ if you’re not creating a team game. If you are creating a team game, then supply a number for each player identifying the team that they’re on. 0 is team A, 1 is team B, 2 is team C, etc.
    • player token: The token covered in the previous section.
    • slot: If you’re making a game that uses a custom scenario, you must provide a “slot” attribute on each player that let’s WarLight know what scenario to give this player. This should be an integer, where 0 is slot A, 1 is slot B, 2 is slot C, etc.

Check for Finished Games

If your call to CreateGame is successful, it will return you a game ID. Store this number for future reference, along with a flag indicating that the game is not finished.

Periodically, (say, every few hours), you should scan all unfinished games and query http://warlight.net/API/GameFeed.aspx for each one. If the game is still in-progress, this API will tell you so. If the game is finished, you can parse the results of this API to determine who won and update your own database accordingly and create new games if necessary.

Member Requirement

All of these APIs are only callable by members, and the CreateGame API can only invite members to games. I realize the latter requirement is a bit restrictive, but since the ladder is one of the biggest draws of becoming a WarLight member, there needs to be a restriction that prevents a third-party ladder from offering this benefit to non-members. This restriction may loosen up over time – it’s much easier to loosen up on these kinds of things than it is to tighten them. Tightening them breaks existing code, whereas loosening them just pleases people.

Reference

For a full reference that contains a few more details on how to use these APIs, please see the API Reference page. If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me!

Announcing WarLight 1.2

WarLight will be going down on Friday, April 1st at 1am PDT (8am GMT) for up to 2 hours. Please plan accordingly for any fast games or single player games that may get interrupted during this 2-hour window.

During this time, WarLight will be upgraded to v1.02.0. This blog post contains a summary of the new features going live.

Open Tournaments

Tournament creators can now mark their tournaments as “open”, which allows any WarLight player to join their tournament without having to be invited! This makes it much easier to set up public tournaments.

This is similar to the Open Seat system that exists for games, but for tournaments. Tournament creators can use the existing open seat prerequisite system to define prerequisites that players must meet in order to join the tournament. Blacklists are also honored, just like they are for open games, in that players that the tournament creator has blacklisted will not be allowed to join an open tournament without being invited.

Map Browser Improvements

The process of picking the map you wish to play on now has additional options to help you explore the maps easier. First off, the map browser now allows for searching, so you can type the partial name of a map, for example, “Earth”, to filter down to all of the maps that contain the word Earth.

Second, there’s new sorting options that allow you to sort the maps by their name, number of territories, or age.

Last, the WarLight maps have been divided into the following categories:
– Featured Maps: This replaces the current “built-in maps” drop-down that exists today.
– All Maps: A way to view all of the maps on a single page.
– Real World Maps: Maps of places that exist in real life.
– Fictional Maps: Maps that look like a real-world place, but don’t actually exist.
– Novelty Maps: Maps that don’t even try to resemble a place.
– Local Maps: Maps that appeal to small communities, such as a specific office building or school.
– Single Player Maps: This category exists just to separate out the Europe Challenge map, which isn’t really suitable for multi-player under some settings since it contains isolated territories.
– Testing Maps: For map creators, maps they’re testing are now placed in their own special place to make finding them easier.

Strategic 1 v 1 updates

As promised in the previous blog post, the Blockade card is being added to the Strategic 1 v 1 settings.

Timezone Improvements

Dates and times have been a bit inconsistent on WarLight. When within a Flash part of the site, any dates were shown in your local timezone. This is possible because Flash knows your timezone. However, the WarLight website always had to display timezones in GMT, since web browsers don’t share their timezone information with websites.

This is being fixed so that everyplace on WarLight will always show you dates in your local timezone. This is made possible by Flash. The first time you hit the Single or Multi-player tab, WarLight will store your timezone so that everyplace on the site can represent dates in your local timezone.

Ladder Improvements

Ladder matchmaking has been tweaked. Instead of matching players/teams with 20% of the ladder on either side, WarLight now matches either 10 places on either side or 25%, whichever is larger. This improves the situation that’s currently faced by the 2v2 ladder, which has a smaller potential pool of teams to play against.

Ladders will no longer invite you to a game with someone you just finished playing or someone you’re currently playing.

The ratings of players in their provisional period are no longer shown on the main ladder pages. You can still see their provisional rating by clicking on their name. The main ladder pages sort provisional players by the order in which they first joined the ladder. This helps to avoid placing more emphasis on provisional ratings than is due.

Players who have finished 30 or more ladder games now have the option of dropping to one game at a time.

The layout of the 2v2 ladder games has been updated so that it’s more readable. This makes the dashboard look a bit cleaner.

Misc Fixes and Improvements

– Profiles now say “1v1” instead of “2 player FFA”
– Changed the way that the Flash app is sized to fix scrollbar issues.
– Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the turn indicators in the chat window to be off by one.
– Fixed a bug that sometimes caused focus to get lost, making hotkeys not work until the next click.
– Fixed a bug that caused the 15-minute auto boot to really be 10-minute auto boot.
– Fixed a bug that caused a white box to appear over player names on the invite screen for players with an extremely large invite list.
– Fixed a bug when previewing a map from the website that caused the “Go back” button to be visible when it didn’t do anything.

EDIT: Forgot one:
– Tweaked the history hotkeys based on feedback. The Home and End keys are now used to go to the beginning and end of the game, and the left/right keys are strictly for moving one turn at a time.