Server up

[Chris Babcock]

So...

I gave the server all the memory I can afford, reset deadlines 24
hours out and marked everyone uncommitted. We'll let it run a couple
days like this and I'll put forward the transition plan in this forum
when I dial it back.

Anybody who would like to contribute towards keeping this thing going
a few more weeks or helping me get things in order to post a useable
replacement to the Google Play Store and Apple App store should send a
donation to this address:

paypal.me/Swift2plunder

In the comments section, include your email address if you would like
your donation to be credited towards whatever donor or incentive
program happens on the new service. If you wish, you may also include
a note to the effect of whether you'd like your donation to go towards
droidippy operating costs, developing the new client app, or getting
that app into the mobile marketplaces. (Last I checked, I need $25 for
Google and $99 for Apple.)

Chris

[fergusonar...@gmail.com]

If I donate, can you agree to implement statistics? I still show as no games played and I've completed multiple games.

[Chris Babcock]

Have you been playing mostly or entirely invitational games? Those aren't shown in statistics on droidippy.

On Diplicity, all games are invitational and the statistics tracking so entirely different as to not be easily comparable.

Chris

[anglosachsen]

Thanks for getting the droidippy server back up, Chris! I hope enough donations are forthcoming to keep it running. Imo Droidippy is still miles better than Diplicity as far as user friendliness goes - so long as the server runs reliably.

I do have one issue that may be connected with the today's reset: I was playing Italy in game 103413 but was already eliminated. Despite this it's now showing as awaiting orders in my open games list although I can't of course enter or commit any orders. Could you take a look please? I'd like to avoid erroneously getting logged as missing a deadline.

Cheers! Mike

[Chris Babcock]

Diplicity and droidippy are client server applications. As a player, you download and use the client on your phone. The server runs in a machine somewhere else in the world, could be Sweden, Kansas City, or a Google data center floating in the Sea of Japan. As a player, you don't think about the server much. It works or it doesn't. When you talk about these applications as a player, you're talking about the client. The droidippy client is better than the Diplicity client, the server is not.

A client server app is a bit like a horse drawn carriage. The Diplicity server is a young, fast, and dependable horse. The Diplicity client is one of those rickshaws used in harness racing. Droidippy is a Pullman Palace Car, being pulled by an elderly​, incontinent, alcoholic camel. I can build a good client for the Diplicity server. All I need is one month with reliable internet where I'm not worried about where my family's next meal is coming from. That camel, though... SMH

Chris

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[Chris Babcock]

As for being marked uncommitted in a game where you don't need orders... I know how that happened. It's my fault. I think it's going to be okay, but I won't have a chance to fix it in a preventative way. Let me know if there's some correction needed after the game adjudicates.

Chris

On Jun 1, 2017 4:05 AM, "'anglosachsen' via Droidippy" <droi...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

[snkb...@gmail.com]

Looks like it's messing up again already. As soon as the deadline ended, it's now counting into the negatives once more. 

I hope everything works out for you man, I know it's expensive keeping things running. You're doing a great job man

[anglosachsen]

Hey Chris. As a former programmer myself, admittedly many moons ago, I do understand client/server architecture. I've had to deal with a number of alcoholic camels myself over the years and an equal number of clapped-out carriages with square wheels - often paired with each other! 

IMO the droidippy client is a lean and extremely easy to use UI. The Diplicity client, on the other hand, has some nice features but still has a long way to go as far as usability goes.

I just had the impression, that the main issue with the droidippy server was the result of limited server capacity (processor/memory/storage) due to under-funding and not primarily due to the backend architecture. It's relatively straightforward to upgrade a hosted/cloud server if enough cash is available but this is seldom the case for a free app without advertising. The users are simply too tight to contribute much and many are not prepared to pay a reasonable fee in return for a reliable and maintained system. They expect that reliability to just happen and don't care about the running costs and the time devoted by the developers/admins. Unfortunately, that's a fact of life in the mobile app-age. 

Of course, a resource-greedy, inefficient backend will quickly gobble up any extra resources one throws at it anyway so that can't be a long-term solution, but it could at least partially alleviate the server problems for the interim period until diplicity, client and server, is sufficiently mature for droidippy to be retired. 

How long that will take is, of course, anyone's guess. If Martin and you are pretty much the only ones who work on it, and that in your limited spare time, then I guess it could be quite a while.

Therefore, despite the reluctance of many users to pay for decent services, it may be worth considering changing droidippy to some kind of subscription fee model using in-app payments. A charge of a Euro (or Dollar equivalent) per game or a monthly charge depending on how many parallel games a user wants to be able to play would be possible options. There could be a free introductory time-period to allow new users to try it out before having to pay anything. After that, it could be beneficial to weed out those who expect a free lunch anyway! I, for one, would be willing to pay such a fee if it helped improve reliability. I think many frequent players would do so too.

The downside would be that some development effort would be necessary in order to implement the subscription model and I know that you don't intend to invest any further time developing what is, essentially, a legacy system. I just think that the amount of effort to implement a simple subscription model should be low enough to make this worth while assuming that it will be months or years until diplicity reaches a similar level of usability to droidippy.

Best regards!

[anglosachsen]

Ah. I forgot to check my reliability stats before and after the adjudication and the server is unavailable again at the moment so I can't see if I got penalized or not.

[Chris Babcock]

To be clear, the drioidippy client is tightly coupled with the
droidippy server and it would be moderately challenging to write a
back end for the client to use a different server. Not impossible, but
not worthwhile, either, because it's 100% native Android Java, one of
the deliverables here is an iOS client. Oh, I also hate Java with a
red hot fiery passion, which is also the umpteenth strike against the
droidippy server.

I will NOT be working with the current Diplicity client, either. Moar
Java. Moar pure Android koolaid. It is autogenerated from the server
code and more of a debugging interface than a game client anyways.
Making contribs to a machine generated code base is not my idea of a
good time.

Diplicity, unlike droidippy however, was designed to have the client
decoupled from the server. So I can use the toolkit of my choice. The
performance needs of a Diplomacy client make hybrid apps feasible, so
I can build a client for Android, iOS, web and a handful of other
targets to support users cross platform from a single code base. When
I talk about switching to Diplicity, I am most certainly NOT talking
about forcing players to use the autogenerated client. I'm talking
about building a new client app with a socially aware UX for the
architecturally correct Diplicity server.

Chris

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[mugiwara...@gmail.com]

I really have no problems with making droidippy a paid app or anything if that's the only way to save it but if you guyswanna replace droidippy with dippy city then could you please try to make it identical to droidippy because honestly dippy city is basically unusable. The maps and chat system of droidippy seem better to me and basically every other player I know. If the plan is to make droidippy paid then I'm up for it. But if it's gonna be replaced with dippy city then the developers should please try to make it like droidippy. Thanks

[Trevor Muten]

Completely agree. Droidippy is excellent user interface and diplicity is a shadow as major drawbacks and limitations. Small charge for Droidippy to enable it to be continue would be acceptable.
Great achievement by the Droidippy developers. Well done.

[Chris Babcock]

Allow me to rephrase. I will be shutting down droidippy by the end of
the year. Whether that happens in July or December is something you
can influence, but money talks and bullshit walks. Don't tell me you
want to keep it going, because IDGAF. It's an overpriced piece of crap
and the community has already demonstrated that they don't want to pay
for it. Forcing people to pay for it has the advantage of reducing
server congestion at the expense of increasing the amount I'm paying
out of pocket and making a service that is not even remotely fun to
operate even more of a nuisance.

Chris

[Chris Babcock]

Should I lock this thread or start banning people whose replies repeat
arguments that they would've realized were already debunked if they
had read the thread?

Chris

On Fri, Jun 2, 2017 at 9:46 AM, <mugiwara...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I really have no problems with making droidippy a paid app or anything if that's the only way to save it but if you guyswanna replace droidippy with dippy city then could you please try to make it identical to droidippy because honestly dippy city is basically unusable. The maps and chat system of droidippy seem better to me and basically every other player I know. If the plan is to make droidippy paid then I'm up for it. But if it's gonna be replaced with dippy city then the developers should please try to make it like droidippy. Thanks
>

[scott...@gmail.com]

Lol Chris. Frany I must be missing something as I see the diplicity UI as better than droidippy, just less features. Features don't me it's 'worse'. The word is mature. Droidippy UI is more mature, not better.
So as I said way early on, droidippy is DEAD. Life support just hasn't been disconnected

[Michael Williamson]

I think we've all got the message: Droidippy is practically dead. Diplicity is the early lifecycle replacement. 

It's pointless debating which has the "better" UI because it's a matter of taste. I prefer the simplicity of Droidippy, cycling between map, orders and chat with single taps left or right. Others prefer the Diplicity menu system. Some like the possibility to group chat in Diplicity, some like being able to set country preferences in Droidippy.

But whatever your preferred UI, fact is both systems were basically developed and administered by two guys in their limited spare time. They've been shouldering costs out of their own pockets because we, the users, simply do not even donate enough to pay for enough server capacity let alone for the hours of work that are needed.

So basically, none of us users has any right to complain...unless you've been supporting dev/ops with significant amounts of time/effort/money.

I personally look forward to Diplicity maturing and until it does, will miss Droidippy. On the other hand, I'm concerned that, if the lack of funding and dev/ops resources needed to really put Diplicity on a professional server/app level remains, then Diplicity may go the same way as Droidippy before too long.

For this reason I have to admit I'm also trialing alternatives like Conspiracy and I'm also going to see if I can get my SW Dev skills up-to-date and maybe help debug, develop or enhance Diplicity features. 

In all of this the most important thing for me is to be able to play classical diplomacy on my android mobile with an easy to use UI and a reliable, robust and fast backend/server. I'll take a free service if I can get it but am willing to pay by use if necessary.

Anyway. Thanks again for all your work, Martin & Chris! I've spent more hours than I care to count and had lots of fun playing Diplomacy on Droidippy. For me, simply the best game I ever had on my mobile.

That's all folks!

Am 03.06.2017 03:49 schrieb <scott...@gmail.com>:

Lol Chris.  Frany I must be missing something as I see the diplicity UI as better than droidippy, just less features.  Features don't me it's 'worse'.  The word is mature.  Droidippy UI is more mature, not better.
So as I said way early on, droidippy is DEAD.  Life support just hasn't been disconnected

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[Chris Babcock]

Also, the Diplicity UI is completely irrelevant because I'll be building a completely different client. "Blah, blah, blah. Diplicity sucks. Blah, blah, blah," is a collection of null argument because all that kvetching is about a bit of code I have expressly stated that I have no intention of using. When I talk about switching the user base to Diplicity, I mean using the Diplicity server code. As a server application, it has a CLI and an API, but no UI for players. 

Whether the player I was replying to understands client server architecture or not, there clearly people reading this thread who don't.

Client server applications are a bit like horse drawn vehicles, as I said earlier. The server is the horse and the carriage is the client. Y'all like the droidippy carriage, but the droidippy horse is overdue for a date with fido's dinner bowl. The Diplicity horse is a damn fine animal, but the Diplicity carriage is a bit hard on the seat. If you have complaints about the "Diplicity UI," you're in the wrong forum, though. IDGAF and neither should you. One design goal of the Diplicity server is that developers should be able to build their own clients that connect to either Martin's Diplicity instance or another instance of the server. So unlike droidippy, the client server communication protocol (the harness design) of Diplicity is documented so that developers can connect to Diplicity servers with apps of their own design.

So my plan is to run a Diplicity server and build a client that can connect to my server, Martin's, or some other Diplicity server if the user supplies the URI. I've been studying Diplomacy play workflows since the turn of the century, so I might know a thing or two about building a Diplomacy game client that Martin didn't when he created droidippy. Droidippy is a great implementation of Froyo era native Android design. With Lollipop, Google introduced a design spec called material design. There's slight incongruity operating a native Froyo app in Modern Android. It's not terrible, but the toolkit I'm using will automatically supply Apple controls for iOS builds and material design elements for Android and all other supported builds. 

Design Goals for Chris' Dip Client

Native, contemporary controls for web, Android and iOS

Support for switching connections among Diplicity servers

Familiar behaviors for current droidippy players (the order of screens when side scrolling from map to chat to results)

In client support for out of game chat and social tools

I also need to make some contributions to the server code, but that's a little difficult for me to describe accessibly.

Chris

[stlt...@gmail.com]

Chris, sent a donation in yesterday. Honestly, should have sent it a long time ago because I absolutely love this game. Still having problems though - getting an error message when I try to submit orders. Now on probation. Looking forward to getting it fixed.

On Thursday, June 1, 2017 at 1:32:46 AM UTC-5, Chris Babcock wrote:

[Dafydd Carmichael]

Chris,

Thanks for the explanation. Very nicely put. I'm sad to see dippy go, but it's clear we've been playing on borrowed time.

[azpunky]

My two cents - whatever server issues Droidippy has, it was only in the last year when it was moved to the shared gaming server that it has had the non-stop server errors. Yes, there were a couple of big outages in the 5ish years I've been playing Droidippy - I remember it was down for a WHOLE WEEK at one point in 2014... the good ol' days. Now it is down probably 90% of the time, and apparently going to die because nobody wants to admin it.

The never-ending request for donations (and I have donated a couple of times) feels like we're covering more than Droidippy and Diplicity, I'm disinclined to support it further. If Droidippy is going away (and that's the app I actually thought I was supporting), and Conspiracy is already out there and clearly running the same api as Diplicity, why continue down this path at all??

I feel like a bill of goods was sold, but we're not seeing actual results.

Sorry this is so negative, but I feel it needs to be said.

Dan

[mugiwara...@gmail.com]

The games are now ending without draws agreed upon or players getting to the required majority. So I guess this is it droidippy is finally gone. Although I've only played for a few months, it is one of the best games I've ever played in my life and I'm sure gonna miss it. Sayonara droidippy.

[Chris Babcock]

Two things here. First, most of these issues were happening already and I was handling things quietly. Second, I did reduce hard disk space when moving to Google, but the out of disk space issues didn't start happening until Google acquired Foxbase and deprecated GCM. At that point, service errors in GCM started generated excessive log entries and crashed the server by filling all available disk space. Third, the droidippy server requires Java 6; it uses deprecated features and will not launch under a current Java version. Obtaining an outdated Java version and coercing the machine to actually launch the server app with it was... dicey.

So, yes, there's maintenance needed for the server app that isn't happening. That's not the hosting. It's the age of the code. 

Chris

[clark....@gmail.com]

Will we have access to our statistics before the app closes for good? It's time to transition to Diplicity but I'd like to take a screen capture of my stats before everything here concludes.

[jonathan....@gmail.com]

Thanks Chris for all your effort over the last year on this

[Chris Babcock]

Yeah, I'll give everyone some time after my app is ready to finish
their games and take screenshots. I'll be saving the history, too. We
may have over 100,000 games here, which would be a nice size corpus
for academic use.

Chris

On Mon, Jun 5, 2017 at 6:31 PM, <clark....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Will we have access to our statistics before the app closes for good? It's time to transition to Diplicity but I'd like to take a screen capture of my stats before everything here concludes.
>

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[clark....@gmail.com]

Thank you so much! And yes, 100,000 games is a lot of excellent data for further study.

[Dan]

Thanks for the responses, Chris. I understand the situation better now. Droidippy will be missed - I'm glad Diplicity is moving forward. 

On Jun 8, 2017 10:49, <clark....@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you so much! And yes, 100,000 games is a lot of excellent data for further study.

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[lluizll...@gmail.com]

Chris and Martin, first of all thanks for the great apps.

I am happy to hear Diplicity's monstrously unintuitive interface is not set in stone! Droidippy's UI worked good enough.

Chris, a question: what's your opinion on the Conspiracy app? They offer IAP without having any kind or permission from Hasbro, which is really bad. However, they managed to get 100 THOUSAND downloads over just 3 months, thanks mostly to their awesome UI and features.

What is there to learn from their project? It is well-done, but I hope Hasbro takes it down OR they allow you to sell using their IP too.

[squi...@hotmail.com]

Tha ks Chris for a few years of fun for me here.
Everyone, there is also a game from google play called 'Conspiracy'. Plays like droidippy. And it seems to be running really smooth.

Good luck in your endeavours Chris.

[Chris Babcock]

My interest has always been in promoting the free Diplomacy hobby, free in the open source sense of freedom rather than free beer. Coders and administrators deserve to be paid, if they wish, and I would like to be paid something commensurate with a skilled laborer. I don't care that I might be able to make over $100,000 a year with the same skills if I was able to function in a corporate environment. I just want something a little better than poverty and I want to fund it noncoercively.

I've had many ideas over the years about how to go about that and this is what I believe could work given the technologies, the social climate and the legal history...

I owe a personal debt to the Judge Diplomacy Hobby. They paid for this hobby from 2008-2016 and folks there as well as here have helped me keep the lights on and go grocery shopping at the end of the month. The things that were free on the judge platform - being a game moderator and playing in games run by a volunteer moderator - are features that I want to make freely available.

My position on unmoderated games on a server has always been that no such thing exists. Permitting unmoderated games on a server allows anyone to place arbitrary demands on the time of the server admin. Martin wanted to create Diplicity with self-moderation features. I don't believe that his Diplicity service will actually be self-moderating, but I do believe his tools are a step towards creating a service that is socially maintainable for significantly more games than any previous service. In other words, it may be possible to host enough games for the service to be financially viable.

Since Martin released droidippy, the original copyright on the Diplomacy boardgame has expired and certain moral rights have passed with the death of its creator. While Calhammer never made another penny off the US market after selling to Avalon Hill, he always supported the monopoly rights of the current owner of his game right up to the end. With his passing and the expiry of the period of legal protection that AH and other rights holders no doubt figured into their purchase price, I have no more qualms about publishing Diplomacy than I would backgammon. PlayDiplomacy.com and, more recently, Conspiracy have marketed clearly commercial implementations of the game, so the case can now be made that Hasbro has condoned it. That's not a position I could take in 2008 or even 2015, but it's reasonable today.

So today I updated my copy of the Diplicity server and the development environment for the toolkits it uses. First step on a long road. I'm going to need to turn the dev chat back on and hope I'm the only one who turned it off.

Chris

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[anglosachsen]

Conspiracy is apparently not a commercial implementation / operation. Contrary to what is shown in Google's Play Store, it's free to use, with no in-game purchases and no adverts. The developers web site has a donate button on the home page and states in the page,

"WHO ARE WE?

A software development company? A big studio? A multinational?

No, none of that. We are just 3 friends and colleagues, software engineers, who decided to embark on creating the Conspiracy application for fun.

We are therefore independent, without sponsoring and we make live and evolve the application to the rhythm of our free time."

I was sceptical at first because the App UI is very slick, looks professional / commercial and really offers an excellent user experience. However, I'm now in contact with the developers and it seems cosher. I think it's so good because 3 clearly professional SW-engineer friends pooled resources and created it together.

Maybe it's worth you contacting them, Chris, to share experience and ideas or maybe even work together? I can imagine that if you guys were to put your heads together, it could be a great exchange both ways.

[marik...@gmail.com]

Hey do you think it was still a good idea to ban all the people that had a minor disagreement with you about non game issues? I'm glad you having these troubles with the game.

[marik...@gmail.com]

You sir are a Nazi scum silencing everyone who disagreed with you. I'm glad you trimmed the community down to 10 ppl who now can't afford to run it. That's what you get. Next time don't ban ppl left and right. Fascist fag

[Dan]

If I were the administrator, Marik, I would ban you for abusive language, which is called out in the game rules. I consider my fellow Droidippy players as friends. Shameful behavior on your part...

Dan

On Aug 30, 2017 06:57, <marik...@gmail.com> wrote:

You sir are a Nazi scum silencing everyone who disagreed with you. I'm glad you trimmed the community down to 10 ppl who now can't afford to run it. That's what you get. Next time don't ban ppl left and right. Fascist fag

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[marik...@gmail.com]

Lol the point which Im making and others have in the past, literally went over your head. That is a problem... Lol priceless

[Dan]

The point you are making is not complicated, and frankly it shows that you don't know that Martin single-handedly created droidippy and hosted it for years. When his career was demanding too much of his time to properly support it, Chris largely took the reins along with several other engineer enthusiasts like Sean, a couple of others - Droidippy and now Diplicity, and Conspiracy are games run my Diplomacy enthusiasts. If you spent any time in the forum, you would know most of these guys. And you wouldn't talk to them like that. You seem to think they owe you service of some sort, as if you were the first person to complain about the issues. Everybody knows it. Catch up, Marik.

Dan

On Aug 30, 2017 16:27, <marik...@gmail.com> wrote:

Lol the point which Im making and others have in the past, literally went over your head. That is a problem... Lol priceless

[marik...@gmail.com]

? I don't think anyone owes me anything... Nor do I feel that way. It's a well known fact that chris bans/banned people who had any disagreements with him. Not only relating to the game. If you paid more attention to the forum you'd know. it's always a good idea to behave like a Nazi and silence anyone who you disagree with. Then complain when you don't have enough people to donate lol. Way to go chris

[samuelf...@gmail.com]

Is the game still running or what? :(