Puppetry

[mondoj]

I was chatting with JPFantasy yesterday about tournaments, and we wandered off onto the subject of puppets because of their possible role in administering tourneys.  It looks like I need to push myself to level 9 so I can play with command puppets. 

I've digested TheBoomer's tutorial as fully as I can without being able to use puppet commands yet, and am curious about a couple of things.

• First, is there a place where our BR puppets are kept so one might be able to read them for examples of working, in-use code?
• Second, are there puppet commands available that are not documented in Boomer's excellent tutorial?
• Third, what game results are we already getting via the existing puppets and settings?

Incidentally, my programming background is very modest but probably suited to this.  I taught myself to program in 1973 using Kemeny and Kurtz's original book on BASIC, then unlearned some bad habits a few years later while establishing that I didn't want to make a career of it.  These days I use those skills for LSL scripting in Second Life, complex spreadsheets, and the occasional Zillions of Games add-on.  So no, I'm no programmer -- but I should be able to contribute to puppetry.

[BCGamer2]

Puppet development is currently in the hands of very few in BR. I am contributing a little bit to it and any help offered is greatly needed and appreciated.
I can email you a puppet file (one that is currently in use) and then we can go from there. Currently we have a reset puppet and a counting puppet (counting how many games are played each month in our gamerooms.

All puppets are kept on a ftp site (required for the autostart puppets). Development is locally on the puppeteer computers.

Under development are a puppet watching the resource prices (currently running but there is only one functionality and many more ideas) and a marathon/tournament puppet (very early stage of development).

Let's chat online next time we both are on (tonight?)

[mondoj]

Puppet development is currently in the hands of very few in BR. I am contributing a little bit to it and any help offered is greatly needed and appreciated.
I can email you a puppet file (one that is currently in use) and then we can go from there. Currently we have a reset puppet and a counting puppet (counting how many games are played each month in our gamerooms.

All puppets are kept on a ftp site (required for the autostart puppets). Development is locally on the puppeteer computers.

Under development are a puppet watching the resource prices (currently running but there is only one functionality and many more ideas) and a marathon/tournament puppet (very early stage of development).

Let's chat online next time we both are on (tonight?)

Yes, let's chat.  I'll be in for a while tonight.  My email is available through BSW if you want to send along that puppet file.  I have the most interest in anything related to a tournament project, but don't mind seeing if there's anything I can add to the others once I get up to speed.

The surprise for me is that there doesn't seem to be a way to easily capture a game result aside from watching for keywords in chat and using /tell.  Surely I'm missing something

[BCGamer2]

The surprise for me is that there doesn't seem to be a way to easily capture a game result aside from watching for keywords in chat and using /tell.  Surely I'm missing something

Well, I am surprised by that, too but it looks like the whole system is based on string modification etc. There is probably an easier way of doing it but I would not know.

[cche]

The trick is, BSW doesn't have the resources or desire to support a separate puppet API.
Hence, all they do is allow puppets to see the same data a human sees.
In fact, though, this is not such a bad design, provided they keep their Human output
stable.

[mondoj]

Thank you, BCGamer, for sending me the code for the existing count and reset puppets.  I finally got to read them over and get a feel for this.  I also went onto the site where puppets are hosted and found the Emerald and Rosehaven puppets which give some strong clues on how to develop a tourney puppet.

My schedule for the next few days is crazy, so I won't get much gaming in.  But once I get back on BSW I need to push to accumulate points to get from level 5 to level 9 so I can lend a hand. 

[Moose_Head]

provided they keep their Human output stable.

BSW puppetry input from the system is stable so long as you use setting NATION: BSW

English and other language specific output is subject to change without notice as we found out with the game results monitoring puppets where we had NATION: EN

[Moose_Head]

Within BSW there is /channel puppets
mostly in german, but at least some of the regulars are pretty good with english.

"Full" Puppet documentation in German:
http://home.arcor.de/bswpuppets/
http://home.arcor.de/bswpuppets/puppet-BL/xgen/puppetbl/dhtml/admain.html

Puppet Forum on BSW ... Mostly german, but questions asked in English might get answered in [sometimes broken] english:
http://www.brettspielwelt.de/Forum/index.php/board,20.0.html

Someone named Kugelschreiber (aka kuli) has written quite a few puppets, and has occasionally shared the sourcecode. A search of the BSW forums might turn something up.

TheBoomer's PDF Guide (may be a bit dated, but is fluently english):
http://www.brettspielwelt.info/Puppet.pdf

The best documentation is the actually in GERMAN and with guarded use of web translation plugins is extremely useful. This document is by far the most complete guide you will find. If you combine that with some of the useful code extracts from Kuli then you will be well on the way to handling some of the more difficult concepts.
Code Snippets

I have spent way too much time debugging and working on puppets now, so feel that I have a better handle than most of some of the intricacies. If you take the guidance from Hugh (cche) which says that it is an interpretive addon then you might appreciate a little bit more about how it works.

Beyond that, best of luck. Any questions, do not hesitate to ask.