Playing online

I was recently thinking for those of us who have very few friends that make it where it seems more solo games are played or with one other person, that maybe via AIM, MSN, or YIM a group of people could get together and play online. The only issue is that maybe someone would decide to cheat and have all the character’s best cards and combos early on. Of course if they are a true gamer then their pride should prevent that from ever occuring. The way I see it working is that one person will play their character and also take care of the villian’s and environment’s deck and will relay what the villian is doing, preferably someone with a webcam so that way there is also a visual as to what is going on as well. Then of course three others will be playing their chosen hero (or more players if more wanted to play). Microphones would also be a plus just because it makes things a wee bit easier than typing out all your action and speeding up the game’s pace.

I for one am someone who probably can arrange meetings with friends every other week and the only person at home I can play with is my wife. We’ll also need to decide want IM to use, I for one don’t have a prefence seeing as I don’t have any downloaded at the moment so what ever most people use will be the one I go ahead and get. So who all is with me on this idea?

Skype would probably be a good option for doing something like that. You can do video conferencing for free on it.

I forgot about skype, but doesn’t it have a subscription fee or some other kind of fee to use features for it?

Not at all! Skype is totally free to use (unless you want to be able to call cell phones or land lines with your skype account, in which case there is a small fee).

Also, an electronic version of the game is something we might consider pursuing in the future if there were interest.

Skype or Google hangouts are both completely viable ways to play long-distance - having done so myself. .We’ve actually been talking about streaming online play for the ExtraLife charity event this year. Here’s the link to our page, and we’ll be sure to keep you updated.

Nice to know you have already planned on making online play a reality, hope to see it come true.

Nice to know you have already planned on making online play a reality, hope to see it come true.

Me too. I love my friends and all, but sometimes you want to play with other people, too, you know? I also like the idea of any game doing my math for me, since I’m arithmetic impaired

Google + has a great group video chat. I’ve also used a combo of Ventrilo and Map tools which would probably not work as well as a video chat due to the cards but still an option.

I think Skype group video chat requires that someone have a paid account.

I think it does, unfortunately; 2 people can video chat with the free account, but it takes a paid account to have more than 2 in the video chat

So only one person has to have a paid account in order to have a group in skype? Anyone here have skype paid for?

Alternatively, using Google+ for a hangout is free group video for everyone.

A problem I just realized with this is situations in which cards are played on or placed under cards from other decks. For example, if one person were playing Haka but they weren’t the one running the villain, both players would have to keep track of cards under Savage Mana.

This is true, but could be solved by using counters. Online play through video chat is not an exact science yet, but we do plan to try and make it easier.

Maybe for now who ever decides to play Haka will also be incontrol of the Villian also. Just hopefully as long as they have the webcam of course. I don’t have one at the moment, but the moment everyone wants to start getting signed up and getting into actual online play and it carries on for awhile, I wouldn’t mind getting a webcam.

Yeah, I’d be down for an online play. Though would it just be audio chat, or is there something that allows you to have a split-screen conference with multiple people’s webcam feeds onscreen? As possible as it is to play with only audio, I’d still prefer to play with people I can see, assuming everyone would have a webcam.

We’ve been trying to think of a solution. Skype requires someone to have a paid subscription, and Google + isn’t quite up and ready yet. And IMs don’t have access to group video if I am not mistaken. So hopefully it can get something sorted out eventually.

Can you do multiple skype windows at the same time?

Well, if that was possible, we’d still have to use someone’s paid account for a conference call. Does Google + actually have multiple video conferencing? Even if it’s not ready, we can wait for a while and just use audio if need be.

As noted in another topic, I just played via Skype with my sister, her 11-year-old son, and another 11-year-old boy.

Skype worked pretty well. I was on one side and the other three were on the other. I used my own copies of the cards so that I could more easily read card descriptions, but let them keep track of all of the hit points except for my hero.

The game ended up taking nearly three hours to play! Part of that was distractions on their end (dealing with a couple younger children, having to take a phone call). Part of that was dealing with me hunting through decks to find cards. Part of that was the normal slowness in learning a game. It will be interesting to see how long the game takes next time. We’re going to try again next Sun.

Glad to know skype is worked out great. Now if someone with a paid account can step foward, we may be able to get this ball rolling. (Hopefully it is just one needing the paid account and not everyone involved)

It’s just one – my sister has one. I think games with her are going to be a family affair, though.

I don’t blame her, I know I wouldn’t want my kids speaking to strangers online, so I wouldn’t allow anyone outside of family and close friends on my contacts.

We’d hoped to try 3-way Skype this morning, but were foiled by hurricane Irene, which knocked out power to Nephew Jason in CT. The rest of us,
though, were able to defeat Omnitron with Absolute Zero, Haka, and Fanatic. Playing time was about 90 minutes – a chunk of that was delay from my sister being distracted by her 3 year-old. I expect the games to continue to get faster as we get more experienced interpreting the rules. The video may be causing a little bit of a slowdown, but is not the major factor.

And I have rules questions which will show up in another thread …

I realise this is an incredibly old topic but I haven’t seen it mentioned on the forums at all so I thought I’d point it out, there is (now) an online version of SotM.
On BoardGameGeek a user called Grudunza got permission from Christopher to make a limited version of the game available. It contains 6 heroes, 2 villains and 2 environments and works beautifully.
Link to thread on BGG
Link to Vassal page where you can download the SotM module (You will still need to download the Vassal program itself too, from the same site)

There is a chat window in Vassal but I have found that using Skype and Vassal at the same time is far quicker and gives a much better experience.

Guess I was too slow. Oh well, I only did what I have done because it was fun and it allowed me to learn a new architecture; though it didn’t help that I got “distracted” by other things.

As a way to practice making dynamic websites with Cold Fusion, I’ve made online versions of Risk (pretty easy) and Heroclix (much more difficult). The app enforced the rules of the game and tracked the game state. It was a great system which allowed my friends and me to set up a number of concurrent games and whenever we had time during our work day we’d log on, take our turns, then log off so the next guy in the turn sequence could take theirs. We wasted a lot of time at work that way…

That asynchronous gameplay, where your buddies didn’t have to actually be online with you at the same time, was one of the best and worst things about them. On the one hand, it made it so that you could participate in multiple games with your friends who could take their turns whenever they had time throughout the day, and so was very convenient that way. On the other hand, this kind of a thing would only work for games that required no actual interaction between players on any given turn (Risk has the tiniest bit of interaction in that a defender can choose to roll one or two dice, but I just automated it to choose the max number of dice possible to roll in every case so that the off-turn choice was eliminated).

Second on the downside was that the game’s rules had to be something that was moderately possible for me to automate. For example, each unit in Heroclix has (had, since I understand it’s gotten more complicated over time) a set number of abilities at each point along their dial, and each ability did a set thing, so that as long as I knew the position of each piece on the board and what tey could do at their current dial position, I was mostly set. Contrast that with a game like Magic: the Gathering, which is a game where every card does something very different from every other card. I could spend my whole life coding the rules for each card and still never be done.

What does any of this have to do with anything? I’ve considered the feasibility of trying to make a SotM online game like my others. On the plus side, while there is collaboration in decision making, only one player can actually take an action at a time, on their turn. There is no case where someone plays a card or chooses to activate an ability on someone else’s turn. So that’s good. But on the negative side, SotM is a lot like M:tG in that the rules on each card can do their own thing, and coding a game where every card has a unique set of rules to it would be tough. That’s what has kept me from starting the project so far, at least.

If I can figure out a way to make it work, I might still give it a try.

Aren’t there some heroes that have incapacitated abilities that allow other players to play, use a power, or draw?

Yes, but that choice is made by the player who’s turn is current. There is no random out of turn playing, it’s only sequential and triggered play, a very synchronized gameplay.

Yeah, but Arenson is right. Player A would be logged in to take their turn and they could choose to play an ability that lets Player B take an action while it’s still Player A’s turn. I suppose once Player A triggers their ability, their turn would be over, so then Player B could log in to activate the action that they got from Player A, but it’s not ideal. Not only that, but any time a choice needs to be made by the players as to the order that an ability affects cards, that would be hard to do in a game where not all of the players are actually present to make that choice.

I imagine that in lieu of having an actual programmer create an actual game that programmatically controlled the game, then having an app that simply showed all of the players the same game elements at the same time and allowed them, the humans, to make all the choices about how to manipulate the elements would be the best you could hope for. I read through the Vassal documentation last night and it looks like that’s essentially what you’d get with the Vassal app.

One other thing to consider – we all want a way to play our physical-world card game online, but once that’s possible, then there’s nothing keeping someone who hasn’t bought the physical-world game from playing it online too. In essence, we’d be making it possible for people to pirate SotM online, which isn’t a good thing.

I think the thread I linked to on BGG explicitly states that as the very reason it doesn’t have all the decks (even though the creator originally made it so they could play all the decks solo while on the road).

I was just toying around with this and it is really interesting. Was a bit odd to use at first but after I figured out how it was used it become no problem. I think tomorrow I will try a game and see how it plays out.

I’ve been giving this issue (an online way to play) more thought than I should while at work today. Here’s me thinking out loud about how to possibly build the solution we’re looking for. I see two possible paths:

(a) your game has a backend (for example: ASP or ColdFusion with a database) to store the state of the game. pros: since the state of the game is stored on the server, everyone will always be able to view the same state as long as they use their “refresh” button. cons: someone would have to host the database (tying everything to a single person, which isn’t great), if the server went down so does the game, and having to post and get info to/from the database every time any change is made in the game means that you’ll spend a lot of time watching your browser refresh. I remember with my online games, I’d often get calls from my friends asking me to go into the admin panels of the game to adjust how many armies were in each territory because someone had made a move but their browser crashed in the middle of it so the database was wrong. That’s not a good way to go.

(b) your game has no backend (it’s just html and javascript). pros: anyone who can take the game’s files and toss them on their server can host the game. cons: because there’s no backend, there’s no shared state of the game for everyone to view.

The best way around this that I’ve been able to come up with so far is to have the URL contain parameters storing the state of every card in the game. It would make for a loooong URL, but is doable. Whenever a change is made (someone draws or discards, for example), they hit an “update” button which refreshes the view with the new URL. Then they send that new URL to everyone in the game so that everyone is on the same page again.

This sounds like a pain to me, but I can’t think of a better way to go. One other advantage of this method would be that you could “save” the game at any time. If you need to end the game but you want to pick it up later, you can just copy the URL and then paste it later into your browser. Boom, the game is set up exactly as it was when you left it. One other disadvantage to this though is that since you’re only maintaining the state of the game as it exists at any given point, the only way to maintain a history would be for someone to paste each new URL into a text document or something so that if you needed to go back a turn or two for some reason, you could do that. Like I said, sounds like a pain, but I don’t see many alternatives.

Well, with the former, making use of WebSockets would eliminate the need for constant refresh, as the server would simply serve the new data as it comes in, rather than the client constantly polling for new information. Of course, if running as an internet accessble app, one could simple create a KeepAlive connection to the server, which would send new information as needed. Also, (assuming you trust nobody to cheat) a peer system could be set up with one “master” player controlling a hero, the villain, and the environment, with other players controlling a hero each. Advance version of the latter would posslbly allow a new player to connect to any other connected player (not just the master) to form a tree connection of sorts.

That said, networked communication is just a tad bit beyond me.

Just a heads up, I was bored a couple of weeks ago and decided to see if I could put together a web page that would allow people to play SotM online together. It’s not finished yet, but I’m far enough along to be able to say that it most likely will be finished and will most likely do what I built it to do (neither of which are granted when you start a project like this).

What I’m building it to do is the following:

1. allow a user to select a set of heroes, a villain and an environment to begin a game.
2. the game will handle all card management, meaning that it will allow the user to shuffle cards, draw cards, and allow users to move cards between areas (deck, discard, hand, table).
3. the game will keep track of hero & villain hp as well as their normal/flipped state. It will also keep track of each card’s hp, if the card has hp.
4. it will NOT make any decisions based on rules or card text. If the user decides that Bunker blasts the villain and a couple of minions with a Grenade Launcher, the user will change the dropdown that tracks each of those card’s hp themself.
5. all of the game’s data will be stored in the page’s URL so that if a group of friends are on Skype or whatever, they can take their turn by moving cards from their hand to the table, changing hp for targets that have been attacked, move cards from the table to discard when they’re destroyed, etc. and then hit “submit”. They can then IM the resulting URL to everyone in the Skype session and everyone else can load that page and so view the same game state as everyone else.

The reason I’m mentioning it before it’s done or before I’m even ready for anyone to take a look at it is because of the ethical issues we’ve discussed here before, i.e. anyone with my web page could play SotM without having paid for it, which I’m not comfortable with. If some kind of solution (or rationalization) can’t be found, I won’t be releasing this thing to the wild. But if we can find a way to do the right thing, then maybe people will be able to use this tool to play this fun game with a geographically diverse group of friends, which would be nice.

What about just listing the card titles(which are already available via one of your PDFs), but do not list the actual card text beyond that. This way if someone did not have the game they could not play it since they would not have the actual card text. (And yes, I know people can make spreadsheets, but after all that work, they should have just bought the game)

But those with the physical cards can always reference them.

That being said, it sounds like you are savvy enough to do what I listed above to the public, but keep a more developed version for yourself.

That’s not a bad idea. It would require more manual tracking by the players than I’d envisioned, since when you drew a card online, you would then need to find your physical card and lay it out in front of you so you could refer to its text, which isn’t great. I would prefer to have a non-gimped version available for people who have actually purchased the game, but I don’t really want to be responsible for maintaining any kind of registration system.

class Grenade Launcher : LastingCard{

    public override IEnumerable<string> Keywords { get { return new string[] { "Equipment", "Limited" }; } }

    public override IEnumerable<Power> Powers { get {
        return new Power[] { new Power(() => {
            var firstTarget = InteractiveServices.SelectTarget(c => true);
            ((HeroPlayer)this.Player).Hero.DealDamage(firstTarget, new Damage(DamageTypes.Projectile, 2));
            if (InteractiveServices.BoolDialog("Would you like to deal damage to a second target?")){
                var secondTarget = InteractiveServices.SelectTarget(c => c != firstTarget);
                ((HeroPlayer)this.Player).Hero.DealDamage(secondTarget, new Damage(DamageTypes.Projectile, 2));
                if(InteractiveServices.BoolDialog("Would you like to deal damage to a third target?")){
                    var thirdTarget = InteractiveServices.SelectTarget(c => c != firstTarget && c != secondTarget);
                    ((HeroPlayer)this.Player).Hero.DealDamage(thirdTarget, new Damage(DamageTypes.Projectile, 1));
                }
            }
        },};
    }
}

I see a lot of talk, Mr. CodeTalker McNotMakingAGame, but where’s your online game, buddy?

Well, I still have to build quite a bit of that currently nonexistance infrastructure API. But, I can assure you, it’s in development. Not quite active development… somewhere just above idle development.

Not to dissuade you from your work Spiff, but ya know, there is a Vassal module out there for SotM that does basically what you said (manage cards, track hp, etc, but no rules). It only has 5 heroes, 2 bosses, and 2 environments. If you could work something out with Chris where it’s like password protected or something, I bet adding heroes to that would be a lot easier, and it already implements multiplayer for you.

I pondered doing it myself, and then just only giving it to my friends (who I trust not to distribute it), but I haven’t had the time. If you encrypted with a password, and only ever posted it on the >G forums, Chris might be cool with it. Just a thought.

I confess to having modifying the vassal module and added in all the missing content (promo heroes, Rook City and all base stuff) for my own amusement, it was very easy to do and scanning in the cards and cropping them was the most time consuming part, actually modifying the vassal module was easy by comparison.

It is not for distribution and asking will not get you a copy (this is not a wink, wink statement, I will not be offering it no matter how much anyone begs, though I am happy to discuss it).

I know about the Vassal module and think that its handling of multiplayer will be far better than mine. I found the fact that you only had access to a few characters to be a deal-breaker, and the UI felt strange to me. Maybe people will find my UI to be strange, will prefer Vassal to mine, and there won’t be an issue.

And it will be used via web browser which means it can be used via an iPad

Ding ding ding! This is the winning statement, for me. My laptop has essentially become a media server for me, since I got my iPad. I’ve envisioned playing SotM on it so many times…

And it will be used via web browser which means it can be used via an iPad

Well, here’s where my implementation will be weakest. I’ve tested it on an iPad, and since it’s basically just a web page, it works great (some of the buttons are a little easy to fat-finger, but that’s fixable), especially as a solo experience. The problem is with multiplayer because of how I’m building it:

My main design goal is to have it be self-contained, meaning that there’s no database or backend system that I need to maintain to store game-state. But the data describing the current game-state needs to be stored somewhere. I’m storing it in the URL, which has a few advantages: (a) it’s easy to do, (b) the browser will maintain a history so I don’t have to, (c) you can save a game and come back to it later by copy/pasting the URL somewhere and then going back to it, (d) you can have multiple games going on concurrently by having multiple browser windows that use different URLs.

There’s a big disadvantage to this method though. Everyone in the game has to have access to the same URL to be able to view the same game. That means play will go something like this:

Everyone’s on Skype, having fun chatting. Someone takes their turn, hits “submit”, gets a new URL showing the updated game-state. They copy/paste the URL into a shared IM window. Everyone else in the game copies it into their browser window and now everyone’s on the same page again. Repeat every time someone takes their turn or updates the game-state.

This is in no way elegant, and I don’t love it. But given my main design goal (see above), I haven’t been able to think of a better way. A friend of mine suggested using Dropbox to store a file containing the game-state data which the game reads and then updates every time someone hits “submit”, which would make it so that all anyone would have to do is announce over Skype “k, done. refresh” and when everyone refreshed their browser, it would fetch the updated data. This has got its own problems though, could end up being an even greater pain in the kiester to implement, and may not even work anyways. So at the moment, sharing URLs is my plan of record.

Which brings me around to why I’m saying all of this in the first place. If you think copy/pasting a URL 100 times during the course of a game on a computer is a pain, doing it on an iPad will be 10x worse…

socuteurl.com ?

Can you make a feature on the web page where you can put the email addresses of the players and be able to click a button which emails our the URL?

I could do that, and it’s not a bad idea, although I imagine that receiving a billion emails during a game may not be particularly pleasant either. Still, having a built-in mechanism for communicating the URL (especially if it were an optional thing people could use or not) rather than expecting users to come up with their own seems like a set in the right direction.

A better solution may be to have the game automatically IM all the participants with the updated URL, though I’ve never done anything like that before, and I imagine programming something like that could be a pain given how many different IM clients (each of which have their own protocols for receiving IMs, I’m assuming) there are in the world. I’ll look into it.

So, my idea of using socuteurl.com just went out the window?

Well, near as I can tell, socuteurl is just a URL-shortening service. I don’t think users would want to copy the URL, paste it into socuteurl to shorten it, then copy it again to IM that one to the other players. And since the game draws the data from the URL, it won’t be able to do that with a shortened URL unless there were some way for the game to un-shorten it. So I’m not sure how socuteurl would help.

Well… maybe I’m mistaken, but I thought you were to enter the url into the browser address. It would be rather simple to use the socuteurl service to automatically generate the url in the page (they even provide a javascript that does to from the bookmark bar on most browsers). Then, socuteurl can convert the shortened url into the actual url, which then loads the game page. And socuteurl addresses are much easier to type than other ones that end up with random hex or base64 urls.

I use this often myself not as a URL shortener, but to make it easy to move a URL from one device to another where copy/paste is difficult/impossible.

Having a look at their FAQ though, it appears they don’t like automated URL generation, unless you ask them first.

And I know you are looking for live games, but the email feature would allow for play by email games as well.

I just had this awful idea of creating an IRC robot which was capable of maintaining the state, and possibly the rules of a Sentinels of the Multiverse game (possibly multiple Sentinels of the Multivers games), respond to commands from typical users, and respond in text both easy to read for humans and computers. Then possibly create an “IRC client” who knows how to talk to this IRC robot and can translate his messages to graphics on the screen. Yes, awful idea, I know.

Have you considered HTML 5 Storage?  Using the localStorage JS object you can have the data persist on the client without expiration.

I did consider that.  However, that doesn't solve the problem of multiple people being able to view the same set of data, which is what I wanted to achieve.  If I understand it correctly, with HTML 5 storage each player could have their data stored locally, but they would not all be accessing a single set of stored data, which is what you'd want for a shared game.

I haven't dropped this project completely from my brain.  If I get enough bored downtime, I may make another run at it.

Correct. But I was thinking that you would designate one client as the host to store the data.  The host submits the data to the web server so it's available to the rest of the clients (ajax polling from the clients should work fine for a game like this).  I used a similar design pattern many years ago when I wrote a SW version of GTM's Battleline game and didn't want to deal with a DB.  I did it as a learning exercise (not for public consumption) but that was a long, long time ago using what is now obsolete tech.  If I were to do it now, I would use a web service restful architecture, JSON objects, JQUERY and all the latest web development goodies.

Is it possible for you to design a button that simply copies the url to the clipboard? It's not as elegant as the IM solution but it migh tmake the process of copy/pasting smother. Just a thought.

I was looking to introduce a friend to SotM. This friend has an unfortunate lack of proximity, making playing in person impossible. The Vassal module seems like a perfect solution except that the cards are from before Enhanced Edition. It's still good enough for my friend to get the flavor of the game, but my preference would be to update the cards that have changed (without adding any of the decks that were intentionally omitted, of course). Has GTG voiced any opinions about letting people update the Vassal module?

As I said to your post on BGG, it requries someone to ask them, which if they are reading, is something you have just done.

I'm not crazy about the idea of the Vassal module being updated to add more heroes/villains/environments, but I would like it to at least include the Enhanced Edition versions of the cards it does have.

Hope this answers your question!

That's exactly what I was looking to do (update existing cards - not add new ones). If I can find a scanner and figure out how to edit a Vassal module (I imagine it isn't terribly difficult). I'll post a link when I get it done.

If you send me the picture files I will have it done quicker than you can think it (either of you)

Ok. What format do you need? Any particular DPI? I might be able to scan them at work sometime this week.

I have the files, so just tell me which decks you need and through what method I send them to you :D

Vassal has

Baron Blade and Grand Warlord Voss,

Bunker, Fanatic, Haka, Legacy, Ra and Tempest

Megalopolis and the Ruins of Atlantis.

so those are the decks I would need to upgrade the current module to the Enhanced Edition.

How can you get them to me? Any method you choose, google drive, email, whatever you want. Dropbox is easiest if you have it because I am just lazy. I'll PM my email to you

Unfortunately the pics that BlueHairedMeerkat had were too small for the vassal module, they look fine but when blown up... not quiet sharp enough.

The ones in the current vassal mod are 299DPI and 355*500 pixels. They are currently in .png format but jpgs work just as well.

Ok. I'll try to get scans of them next week if someone else doesn't send them to you first. Does exact pixel count matter or does it just have to be close?

I can resize with ease, make them whatever you want