Soldat :: Introducing Soldat Web Gather

Hello Soldat Community,

I am here to unveil a project MM and I have been working on for several months now: The Official Soldat Web Gather.

This is much like current IRC gathers, such as the ones in #sna.gather and #soldat.mapping, except instead of relying on IRC, this gather is in your web browser utilizing AJAX and Javascript.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept of gathering: a gather is where a game with a certain number of rounds of Soldat is organized and prepared on the fly, as opposed to pubs. This is sort of like clanwars, except without the clans.

http://soldat.thd.vg/en/gather

The in-game commands are:
!p/!pause - Pause the game
!up/!unpause - Unpause a paused game
!map MAPNAME - Change the map of the current round
!r/!restart - Restart the current round
!unbanlast - unban last banned player

How it works:
- Make sure you're logged in. (look at the top right corner of the site)
- At all times there is a queue for non-running gathers.
- When you join a queue, you are not allowed to join a queue for any other gather.
- When the queue you are in fills up, the web browser of each member of the party emits a beep followed by a join game link.
- The game lasts for the number of rounds specified by the website.
- When the gather ends, you are all kicked, the server shuts down, and the queue for this gather is then emptied and ready to be filled up again.

Additionally:
- If you are in a queue that has not yet filled up and close your browser window/tab, in 30 seconds of not returning to the page you will be removed from the queue.
- http://soldat.thd.vg has a friends system where you can add people to your buddy list (assuming they accept your request). When one of your friends are in a gather, their name turns cyan.
- In order to use the gather, you must be logged in. http://soldat.thd.vg uses the exact same accounts that the SoldatForums use so just use your normal username and password

What will be added in the near future:
- Player statistics (largely just involves me copying over code from my U13 rentals panel and tweaking it slightly)
- Possibly more in-game commands
- More gather servers, such as ones like Realistic Inf, HTF, Rambo, and others. The way I have the logic set up, adding more gather servers is extremely easy.
- IE support. It should currently work great in Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, etc

Thanks to:
- Myself for writing all the code

- MM for the idea and development encouragement
- Furai (aka Wookash) for really useful suggestions on the gather's usability and pascal scripting logic
- FliesLikeABrick for hosting and suggestions on the efficient way of doing things behind the scenes
- The people/organizations behind PHP, Ruby, Python, Apache, Bash, MySQL, Javascript, DOM, & JSON since they are the tools I'm using

Talk to us:
- The discussion and alpha/beta testing for the gather has been in #jrgp @ quakenet. Join the channel to chat with us live
- Please post suggestions/ideas/bugs/etc in the Soldat Forums thread.