Timer changes & other changes

coyotte508

Timer

The ability to specify when the timer starts and ends was just added. Two new game durations are added: 1h and 6h, and the 5 days game duration was removed.

It can be useful for live plays: specify a game duration of 1h, 5 minutes per move, and a timer starting at 6 PM and ending at 10 PM, and if the game is filled after 10 PM you can safely wait until the next day, at 6 PM, to start playing. And if a player is away for more than one hour, he's dropped out.

For time zones, just do the same: a game duration of 6h, 15 minutes per move, and a timer comfortable for your timezone, and you should see people playing at the same time as you.

Here's a feedback thread, to see if we should add or remove some options.

UI

Two regressions were fixed:

Being able to differentiate a normal game from a spaceship game in the list
See directly the player's faction in their games on their profile

And of course the lists look better now, with a bigger icon and more information.

Under the hood

There were a lot of under the hood changes: the web framework on the server was changed to koajs from expressjs, the sessions are not stored server side anymore, and the data structure was changed to allow to implement other games / several versions of a same game more easily.

Plans

Here's what we are looking at for now

Updating the spaceships expansion
Adding internationalization (we already have French & Italian in our team, and a Portuguese volunteer)
A lot of additional under the hood changes: use JWT exclusively instead of sessions, split the backend from the front end, better admin interface

No additional games are to be added in the near future, but we'll see after all that is done!

ariallito

The game is awesome. Many thanks for the creation and taking care of this. Great job!!! :clap:

JamesWolfpacker

Is the timezone set for Central European Summer Time?

coyotte508

@JamesWolfpacker The timezone adapts based on your computer. If you set a game to run between 5 and 8 PM, someone in another timezone 3 hours away would see the game running between 2 and 5 PM. There's no need to do any conversion on your part.