Rob Isakson, however, is a designer. He’s got a much better eye than me for things like this. He’s created a UserScript which removes all of the images, widens the tables, and generally makes things easier to read. You can download it here.

For those in the know, UserScripts are small bits of JavaScript code that run in your web browser for pages you specify. After the page is downloaded, and before it’s presented to you, the script runs, and can modify the page however you want. I’ve used this in the past to do things like add links to pages for BugIDs that appear on JIRA pages at work, but I’ve never used them to change around the design of a site.

If you’re one of the few people that do not like the look of the site, or want something more “work safe”, that doesn’t involve Gandhi shaking his finger at you, give the script a shot.

If you’re running Chrome, you can just install the script, and it will become an extension. If you’re on Firefox, you’ll need to install the GreaseMonkey addon, which manages UserScripts.

I am currently working on a rewrite and redesign of the site for this fall, in hopes that there will still be a use for it when Civilization V is released, and I’m taking all feedback that anyone has on the design or functionality of the site. Let me know what works, what doesn’t, and how horrible of a designer I really am. As with everything so far, I’ll try my best to accommodate anyone.

1.04m was a test build for multiple Pitboss support. Since it worked, I’m collapsing it back into the main build, and jumping up to 1.05.

Multiple Pitboss servers are now fully supported. Please see my previous post regarding how to set this up.

There are also some fixes for issues found by users, and a request from Astrologix added in.

Remember, sending me emails with requests will eventually get the tool changed

Changes in 1.05

• Multiple Pitboss Server Support! Select any of the running games from the drop-down list.
• The “Refresh” button will gray out when the Uploader Tool is enabled, ot prevent the game name from getting switched.
• The Tray Icon for the Uploader Tool will now show the name of the game being run. Hover over it to see.

This comes directly from Pitboss itself. PlayYourTurn doesn’t add or remove anything from the player name in any way.

Basically, this means that the player is logging in with different game files from the Pitboss server. For example, they may have edited some of their LUA code to change the interface, or they might have edited some Python scripts somewhere, or they might be using an unsupported language translation they hacked together themselves.

This can be completely innocent, or intentionally malicious / exploitive. It’s up to the players to know who they’re playing with, and trust them.

I will not be hiding or otherwise doing anything with this information. It’s on the Pitboss screen, so it’s on the website. Players have a right to know.

To run multiple copies of Pitboss, here’s what I did:

First, I followed the instructions on Scott Parker’s blog to make a “stripped down” copy of Pitboss for my server. The article is old, and only talks about Vanilla and Warlords, but the same steps can be applied for Beyond the Sword.  The gist of it is removing all the art / sounds / scenario files you don’t need, so that the entire directory to run Pitboss is significantly smaller than the entire Civ 4 directory.  If you are running Pitboss on a server that already has Civilization 4 installed on it, you can skip this step.

Next, create shortcuts that launch Pitboss with the ALTROOT argument. This tells the Pitboss program that you want to run it with an alternate directory, which means that all of the configuration files, saves, and whatnot will go to the specified folder. Create a shortcut, and have the target be the following:

“C:\pitboss\Beyond the Sword\Civ4BeyondSword_PitBoss.exe” /ALTROOT=c:\pitboss\1

Where “C:\pitboss\Beyond The Sword\” is the directory you installed Pitboss to, and “C:\pitboss\1″ is an empty directory you have created to store the configuration files / saves.

To be completely clear, YOU ONLY NEED ONE COPY OF PITBOSS. The ALTROOT directories are very small (~3 megs), and do not contain any executables or anything like that.

You will use this shortcut to launch this instance of Pitboss. Double click it to open, and let the GUI come up. Close the GUI whenever it finishes loading.

Now go to C:\pitboss\1, find the “CivilizationIV.ini” file, and open it up. This file contains various configuration options for Civilization 4, and Pitboss.

Search for the word “Port”. It’s at the bottom of the file for me. You should see the following:

; NetComm Port
Port = 2056

2056 is the default port that Pitboss hosts games on. Change this port to something else (2057, for example), and then reload Pitboss, using the same shortcut. Now when it starts up, it will listen for connections on the new port.

You can repeat this process as many times as you want, and have many Pitboss servers running on one machine, using only one install of Pitboss itself. Remember that each shortcut needs it’s own ALTROOT directory, and need to have a different port number. Be sure to keep it straight!

To connect to a game running on a non-default port, all you have to do is add the port after a colon to the IP address in Civilization 4.

For example, if the game you play at is normally at IP 10.20.30.40, you would type “10.20.30.40:2057″ into the IP / Hostname box in Civilization 4 to connect to the new instance you created.

After you have multiple servers running, you should install the PlayYourTurn.com Uploader Tool in to each directory you created for the ALTROOT stuff. Each instance of Pitboss should have it’s own Uploader executable / log / ini file, so everything is kept neat. Be sure to use the right Uploader Tools with the right Game Names, and you should be up and running multiple instances of Pitboss, and sending events to our servers here, to be logged.

Feel free to ask more questions in the comments here. If needed, I can add images to this post to better clarify.

On top of that, I often make rather small changes to the site that do not warrant a full-on news post. With a twitter page, I can go on about the smallest of features, without bothering the majority of users.

So roll your eyes if you want to, but if you’re interested in the smaller issues on the site, feel free to check out the PlayYourTurn Twitter page.

This was brought to my attention at around 4:30 AM PST, and I resolved it just now, at 4:55 AM. I am unsure when it started.

Obviously, as the database was not working, events were not recorded during that time.

I apologize for any issues this may have caused.

Update 4/20 11AM PST:

My webhost, 1and1, is having hardware issues with their database servers. This has been causing corruption of data (fun!), and while troubleshooting the issue they just randomly restart the mysql process whenever they want. This is causing a slew of database communication errors when viewing pages, and it means that a lot of events will probably be lost.

This issue is out of my hands. The 1and1 system admins are looking into it now, and assure me that the issue will be resolved “soon”. This is where a hosting company proves it’s worth.

I have done everything I can to preserve the data already stored on the site, but for the next few hours it’s going to be choppy.

Update 4/20 1:30PM PST:

The database has been stable for about an hour now. I haven’t received any word from 1and1 at all, but hopefully the issue is resolved.

My game is tracking properly without needing to restart the Uploader Tool, so hopefully everything is working fine now.

Again, my apologies for this issue.

Update 4/20 3:00PM PST:

1and1 has closed the issue without a word, but sent me a survey. I had some choice words for the lack of responsiveness to the issue, but it appears as though this ordeal is over.

Update 4/20 6:30PM PST:

It’s happening again, and I have been on hold with 1and1 for 5 minutes now. The website came back long enough for me to post this, but who knows how long it will stay this time?

I’m out for blood now.

Update 4/12 12:00PM PST:

Site has been stable for 8+ hours. Again, no word from 1and1. Really poor communication on their part.

I’ve heard from other customers of 1and1 that their service has been really bad for the past week: DNS servers going down, databases crashing, etc.

No official word from 1and1, but I’m hoping this is all resolved now. One more incident like this, and I’m jumping ship to a new host.

The link on the Download the Updater page has not been changed, and still points to 1.03. I am recommending that people currently hosting games to stick with 1.03, unless you want to help test the new version. Eventually everybody will move to the multiple-support client, but for now I’d like to have some public testing before I have people with live games switch over.

The Uploader Tool looks a little different, and has a little dropdown box for the game name. It will populate with the names of all of the Pitboss games you have open on the server, and you can select the one you want to use for that instance of the uploader tool. This means you can run multiple instances of the uploader tool, select different names in the tool, and run multiple Pitboss games with multiple Uploaders monitoring them.

Tips

• Obviously, you need different names for the games
• You need to run an instances of the uploader tool for each Pitboss server.
• I would recommend having different copies / folders for the Uploader Tools. Otherwise, the logs and preference files will get jumbled up.
• The “Refresh” button is only used to refresh the game list in the Uploader Tool. If you open a new pitboss server after the tool is open, you can refresh the game list to pick up it’s name.  Never hit it when the tool is running. The fact that it doesn’t “disable” when the uploader is active is a bug.

I know that quite a few people were interested in this support, and I’ll be reaching out to them now. I would love to get some more testing on this as soon as possible.

A quick clarification on the design before I go any further: Messages and inboxes are based on Players (Civilizations) in Games, and not on Users themselves.

That means that in anonymous games, you can send mail to Alexander of Greece, without knowing which PlayYourTurn.com user corresponds to that civilization.

That also means that if you are playing more than one civilization in a game for whatever reason, you will have separate inboxes and messages for each civilization.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about the feature some more.

You can view your inboxes by clicking here, or by clicking on “My Inboxes” to the right. Obviously, you must be logged in to view your inboxes. On this page, you should see a list of all of your players, in all of your games. It should look something like this:

It shows you the game name, your player name / civilization, and then two numbers. The first is the number of unread messages, and the second is the number of total messages. The icons kind of suck, but they’ll do for now.

Clicking on an inbox from this page will open it, and show you all of the messages you have for that player in that game. It will look something like this, which I hope isn’t too incriminating for me:

Here you can see all the basics you’d need for an inbox: Who the message is from, their civilization, the in-game year and real-world date the last message was sent, the subject of the message, and the unread / total message count. There’s also a “New Message” button at the top, that will allow you to write a new message to any non-eliminated human player in the game.

Clicking on a message will bring it up to view:

Messages read top-down, so the newest messages are at the bottom. You can see the discussion Will and I are having about testing the diplomacy setup. Apparently he was having some issues. Anyway, each individual message has the same basic metadata mentioned on the inbox page, specifically who sent it, and when.

You can respond to messages by scrolling to the bottom and filling out the form. This will keep it in the same message thread. To create a new message with a different subject, go back to your inbox.

Sorry for the delay in getting this out. Work has picked up quite a bit during the past few months, and my girlfriend and I bought a house. The majority of my weekends are now spent working on it, painting, etc. That should settle down in a few months, but for now it’s pretty hectic around here.

The next planned major feature is support for multiple Pitboss servers on one machine. Don’t worry, I hear you, I’m just busy!

UPDATE: I should also mention that you will receive email alerts whenever you get a new diplomatic message. If you would like to turn this off, there is a new setting in the “Edit My Settings” link on the sidebar.

You can choose one of the installed themes by going to the Edit Settings link on the left side of your screen. From there you can select from a drop-down list of themes available on the website. These are simply CSS files that will change some of the basic display options for the website.

Currently there are only three, really. “Default” is the site you know and love (or hate), “CivStats” attempts to look more like the old CivStats website, and “High Contrast” uses dark background colors in an attempt to make the tables easier to read.

These themes are by no means done, and I will tinker with them for a while, and perhaps add new ones.

As mentioned in the previous post, if you have ideas on how the site should be colored, feel free to send me a modified css file! I can drop it right in. You and other users can immediately start using it.

If you don’t know anything about CSS, you can just send me a mock up done in Photoshop or Paint or whatever, showing me what colors you think should go where.

Don’t grumble silently if you don’t like the look of the site. Let me know, and help me make it better.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, I’m a backend guy, and not a web designer.

If you are a web designer and have any suggestions at all, please feel free to let me know. If you want to grab my CSS file and play around with it, I’d be more than grateful. Even if you’re not a designer, if you have suggestions, you can do a quick mock up in paint or Photoshop, and show me what colors you want where.

It would not be hard to add “skins” to the website, with different color schemes. If you let me know what you want, I can make it happen.

Also, on an unrelated note, I’ve noticed a few games have been created and abandoned. One of them appears to have had two instances of the uploader tool run on it, and loaded two separate games into one. If you run into issues, or if things are not clear, please contact me. I’d be happy to spend time troubleshooting issues and clarify things. If there are legitimate issues with the tool / site, I’d like to know, and I’ll fix them quickly, but I need you to report them.