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Comments on RonHaleEvans

# 17 Comments. # Hi Ron, I think some of my emails to you may have gone missing, please check your spam folder.

-- Jessica_Eccles 2016-09-07 15:59 UTC


Do you still want to play those 10x10 challenge games Ultima, Zendo (aka PiecepackCooking), and AlienCity as we expressed tentative interest in January (for later in the year when I wasn't swamped with PhD completion stuff)? If not on the wiki, where? I can't create nor edit pages on your personal wiki. I could create a page on trevorldavis.com/piecepackr but since it is a static website you'll need to send me moves by e-mail, text message, postcard (I'm toying with creating a Play-By-Mail postcard image generator with diagram and move history), or Github Pull Request. Since I have a toddler running around at home some kind of asynchronous play is convenient for me. Still need to write an Alien City generator (it is on mount todo) but I'd be a little more motivated to get it done sooner if I knew I would get to use it to play some games... Ultima is ready to play now...

-- TrevorLDavis 2019-08-01 22:11 UTC


Yes, I want to play, although I gave up on the 10x10 challenge. I'm thinking that everyone who wants one can create a play by wiki page with a name like RonHaleEvansPlayByWiki. Each of these pages can contain multiple gamea, to cut down on clutter. What do you think?

-- RonHaleEvans 2019-08-02 00:20 UTC


That works for me. Another possibility would be to create and use a "Play By Wiki" section in one of the player's personal page (so no extra wiki pages at all but the other player's would be making edits to that host's personal page).

-- TrevorLDavis 2019-08-02 03:19 UTC


I considered that, but I think in many cases, the play by wiki material would overwhelm the rest of the user's personal page, both in amount and in shininess. For example, I wouldn't want my relatively small and drab list of games I've designed to have to compete with your large, animated game diagrams. It occurs to me that this way the play by wiki comments can be separate from other comments.

Feedback? Do you have an idea for a naming convention that's a little more elegant than my JaneDoePlayByWiki?

Another advantage of separating the pages is that the play by wiki pages can be tagged with something like CategoryPlayByWikiPage so they can be gathered automatically by regex for anyone who wants to see real-life piecepack games.

-- RonHaleEvans 2019-08-02 03:39 UTC


PBW is a little shorter to type. Normally stands for "Play By Web" but "Play By Wiki" is a subset of that so not inaccurate. The other alternative besides a page per game host/moderator could be to have one page per GameName so something like GameNamePlayByWiki or GameNamePBW i.e. UltimaPBW, AlienCityPBW, PiecepackCookingPBW. This would make it easier for someone trying to learn a game to possibly see multiple examples and make it easier to cherry pick a couple ones to add to the Game page proper. Although the GIF animations aren't that big probably don't want too many on any one page for performance reasons.

-- TrevorLDavis 2019-08-02 04:59 UTC


"PBW" isn't a WikiWord in CamelCase so doesn't trigger the wiki routines that make it a link: PBW versus PlayByWiki.

I thought about grouping per game instead of per player, but decided there were more likely to be collisions when multiple people refreshed the page multiple times per day with per game pages. There's also the issue of having too many animations per page, as you pointed out.

Sticking with my scheme for the moment...

-- RonHaleEvans 2019-08-02 05:14 UTC


Well it seems JaneDoePBW is a WikiWord even if PBW by itself is not but I'm fine with JaneDoePlayByWiki as well.

-- TrevorLDavis 2019-08-02 06:16 UTC


I thought about checking JaneDoePBW, but I was so sure from past experience that I didn't bother. See what that gets me. :)

OK, I'm inclined to go with JaneDoePBW because it's shorter, it's still a WikiWord, and it can stand for Play By Web as well as Play By Wiki. One disadvantage is that it's more cryptic. On the other hand, many gamers already know what PBW stands for.

Trevor, because you have some specific ideas about how to set up a PBW interface with piecepackr, and you've been party to this whole discussion, would you please create the initial documentation page? I guess you can probably cannibalize the 10x10 page you made... Please let me know if you're too busy. Thanks for everything.

-- RonHaleEvans 2019-08-02 07:01 UTC


By the way, once you set everything up the way you prefer, I can announce the new feature in the front page News section, and wherever else it's appropriate.

-- RonHaleEvans 2019-08-02 07:04 UTC


I'll write something up. However right now though for the immediate future the PBW interface with piecepackr will be:

  1. Copy and paste the PPN notation into a text file (and save it)
  2. Manually run some R commands to create diagram (and perhaps animation)
  3. Manually upload the diagram (and perhaps animation) to an image host and link to them in the wiki

Note if only one player does this (for every other move) the play experience should still be somewhat smooth. Of course if the players sets aside a dedicated PBW piecepack board in their house they wouldn't need to interact with piecepackr at all to play. Or they could manually take and post pictures. Or they could post VassalMode vlog files...

In the future I was thinking of maybe writing a Shiny app which would let a user visit a web page, enter (or copy and paste) in the PPN text for a single game, and it would generate final image and animation for them. Maybe also let them walk through a game move by move. Then they presumably could right-click save the image/animation. I don't have a VPS through my webhost so I'd need to find somewhere else to host it. Probably not something I'll be doing very soon.

-- TrevorLDavis 2019-08-02 19:14 UTC


Wrote up some basic documentation and moved the 10x10 Ultima game under TrevorLDavisPBW. Let me know if I misunderstood anything about how you wanted Play-By-Wiki to operate.

-- TrevorLDavis 2019-08-02 23:31 UTC


Pretty much perfecf! I may tweak a couple of things as time goes by, but for now I'm just going to publicize your pages. Thanks, Trevor!

-- RonHaleEvans 2019-08-03 00:29 UTC


Sorry, job hunt is currently taking precedence over piecepack things

-- RonHaleEvans 2019-08-08 04:51 UTC


Good luck!

-- TrevorLDavis 2019-08-08 21:40 UTC


We went househunting today in addition to my recent jobhunting. Nevertheless, spurred on by Dan Burkey's announcements in the Facebook group, I'm going to try to make a splash of publicity for PPN and play by wiki tomorrow (the 16th in Seattle) before I forget about it. I'm still reading the spec!

-- RonHaleEvans 2019-08-16 07:07 UTC


> I'm still reading the spec!

Let me know if you have any spec suggestions! Still figuring out exactly how I'd want "macros" to work (easiest solution may just to prepend macros with a $ (or maybe &) like b8=$q {promote pawn at b8 to a black queen} but it is a little ugly looking) and an elegant notation variant of "brace expansion" that combines multiple expansions "pairwise" instead of "crosswise" (i.e. t@{a..e..2}{1..5..2} when implemented will do t@a1 t@a3 t@a5 t@c1 t@c3 t@t5 t@e1 t@e3 t@e5 and while that is useful would also like an alternative that does just t@a1 t@c3 t@e5 although we already have proposed uses for () [] <> {} `. Maybe use `' i.e. `0..5'@`a..f'`1..6' as a shortcut for n@a1 a@b2 2@c3 3@d4 4@e5 5@f6 and use something other than ` as a "drop beneath other piece" token?

> I'm going to try to make a splash of publicity for PPN and play by wiki

Sounds good although the PortablePiecepackNotation currently supported by the parser is alpha and still pretty basic (only allows manipulating top pieces on the board and only allows placing in the standard piecepack components). I did add support for a (currently non-chaining) = token (i.e. b4=4> {the top piece at b4 is switched to a 4-valued coin facing right} and I wrote and published an R package to do brace expansion so adding brace expansion support to PPN will probably be the next proposed notation enhancement I'll implement. Then I should probably write an oblique projection helper function so one can more easily make 3D diagrams with piecepackr and PPN (and help me debug things when I implement support for manipulating non-top pieces on the board).

> We went househunting today in addition to my recent jobhunting.

Good luck! I'm also spending time looking for a new job and have some work deadlines in September/October so might be a bit slow in implementing all the piecepack things I'd like to implement.

-- TrevorLDavis 2019-08-16 18:50 UTC


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