It could be that the other players in the game pressed ready. If all are ready before 5 mins, the turn processes then, and the next 5 minutes begins.

Just refresh a lot I suppose.

Yep, the turn moves on but my screen says it didn't. Solved it by refreshing more often. Thanks.

+1 for being named "Chris Triangle"

Never had a problem with it, refresh regularly.

This can be solved in two ways. First, like you said, refresh frequently. Alternatively, you can just click the "global" or "notes" tab on the page, or, like I do, fuck around on the forum while the game is processing. The other option is to not press ready when finished with your moves. It should be noted, though, that while this guarantees a full five minute phase, it also guarantees that at least half the board will hate you for taking the full five minutes. This should only be used if, for example, you need to go to the bathroom or take your dog outside and need to know when the game will process.

I too wish there was an alternative to frequent refreshs. Maybe an AJAX-based notification.

If I had to guess I would guess that your computers clock is not set up right. Check and make sure you have your timezone set correctly and that when you post on the forum the time matches what you see on your computer clock.

@jmo ... you have diagnosed a different problem. The issue at hand has (almost) nothing to do with the time of day and everything to do with the passage of time. The local clock that ticks down after the page is loaded may or may not match reality, but it does tick down for 5 minutes (possibly adjusted for an initial time-of-day error). @virtuslex identified the problem & solution ... the local clock count-down is not refreshed if the game processes early, so it cannot be counted on to warn you unless you have orders to submit and have not yet hit 'ready'.

This is only a real problem, of course, when you do not have orders to submit ... which frequently happens in retreat or build phases. Someone with the only retreat in a spring move can enter the orders quickly and mark ready, which forces the game to process. Unless other players are refreshing frequently, they can be caught napping and lose much of the 5-minute period for the fall moves.

Once you become aware of the problem it is easy to address, but as the easiest approach also extends every phase to a full 5 minutes, it is not ideal. If there were some way to push the fact that the game has processed to all players, that would be nice. I have no idea how difficult that would be to bolt onto the current implementation, however.

Web browsers don't generally take kindly to push implementations, although add-ons/plugins like flash and actual Java applets do so quite cleanly.

You could pretty easily code up an ajax call that runs every 5 seconds to check if a turn has been processed on the back-end and trigger a page refresh if it has.

You'd probably only want that feature enabled for live games so opened games that aren't live don't hammer the back-end unnecessarily.

@y2k - That's a pull, not a push. And yes, that is one way to do it for turns less than say 1 hour in length.

Yes that is a pull. My suggestion goes along with your expressed hesitation towards a data-pushing solution.

Gotcha. We could also write a simple IFRAME webpage that was fed a gameid and did the AJAX check and the refresh to the main IFRAME without ever changing the site. Maybe I'll give that a try this week and put something on Draugnar.com for y'all.

Be careful with that, there's so much data on the page that relies on the current phase and may not be within the scope of the IFRAME that a full page refresh may be required to fully solve the issue.

The idea I have would handle it. You'll see. Trust me, like you, I do know what I am doing and make a living at it.

Sounds like it, can't wait to see it!

I believe you can do push with HTML5 web sockets- but it would be a lot of work to rearchitecht the relevant parts of game processing (including messages/votes) to support notifications cleanly. And, of course, websockets don't work in older browsers (but, depending on webdip's browser demographics, that might not be a problem).

I might be interested in helping if you were thinking of going this route.

You'd be significantly complicating the rather straightforward PHP implementation we have here by doing that. You'd solve 1 issue and generate 3+ more at the same time.

Yeah, easier to write a wrapper that pulls.

FWIW I make a living with this kind of stuff, too, but am a bit removed from code throwing these days. I am concerned with excess traffic and load on the site as well as with the potential data integrity issues. Assuming @Draug is not trying to sabotage everyone playing live games, though, it would be nice to see what he comes up with. I think re-architecting the site, though, is fraught with all sorts of potential dangers ... bringing to mind the five scariest words in the English language: "How hard can it be?"

Nope, no sabotage. In fact, the idea is to do the primary churning on my server so nobody can get the code and simply return to the main page a "refresh now" indicator. That way no one could try to use anything I wrote with malicious intent and I will be happy to have another expert code review the C# code behind of the page.

:)

There is also someone hits save and then when you think you have the full 5 minutes he switches to ready and the phase advances.