Mafia System - Updates and Suggestions - Page 2

On November 21 2012 00:27 Acrofales wrote:
Well, one thing you could do quite easily is receive PMs and simply list all the night actions for the host. For the common roles you could even set up a number of simple rules that the host can choose from to automatically process them. The idea would be to PM night actions in a prespecified format (once again, taking into account that people often don't follow syntax and in the worst case you'd have to automate a reply saying "I don't understand, please use the following syntax: blablabla").

Then, you simply have a rule-based system that checks for things like whether people were roleblocked, whether medics protected shots, etc. etc. Depending on the specific flavour of rules the host uses (such as sometimes mafia shots can be blocked, sometimes they can't, sometimes roleblocking will prevent one action, sometimes all actions, etc. etc.) the system could generate the night actions in a nice coloured PM to the host, and the host could tell the system to automatically generate and send the PMs. Hell, it could do the day - and nightposts automatically too, but flavour will suck

If you want it for omgus mafia and control the site, I would recommend doing drop-down lists for night actions, that way you don't have to worry about parsing people's weirdly phrased PMs.

A database of nicknames obviously works, but requires someone to keep it updated. I mentioned Levenshtein distance, because it is automatic.

On November 21 2012 03:15 Acrofales wrote:
Okay, well, I'm not entirely sure what you want from this thread. You seem to have a good idea of what you want to do and how to do it. If you want help with design, programming or anything else, just say the word.

I, like prplhz, strongly recommend you set this up in an iterative manner. Make lots of small projects that are useful individually and can easily be changed if actual use turns out to be different from expected use.

As for the use on TL, yor best bet is to PM GMarshal about it. I don't actually know how far the red hammers' authorty goes, but if he's not able to clear the use of a bot, he'll at least know who can. For server side use I think only the admins will be able to say much. Maybe ask R1CH? Fairly certain the answer will be "hell no", though.

For starters, writing a bot that refreshes a vote thread every 10 minutes or so and updates a votecount if there are changes sounds like something good. If Zona or prp already have that, then take a look at the code and see if you can use that.

On November 21 2012 07:41 gonzaw wrote:


It's not all nice and dandy.
I have the "idea" of what to do and an idea of how to do it....but there are still some problems that keep arising and I may need some help (specially in the design phase)


For instance, right now I just figured a new design problem.
For example, what can happen when the night phase ends and night actions should be resolved?

According how my "automated" system would run in OMGUS, the system would automatically resolve night actions, and automatically create the Day X thread/post
However, by what you guys want in TL, the system would most likely give the host a list of night actions, let the host confirm/change those as he sees fit, and then the system tells the host how the actions were resolved and gives him a template of a post; then the host creates the new Day post by himself using this template (and he adds the flavor he wants).

These are 2 completely different ways of using the same feature of the system, which is "night ends and night actions must be resolved/day post should be posted".

What I thought was that when a host creates a game, he should decide how much control he wants on said game (assuming the forum allows it, for instance with that bot thing)
So one host may decide to let the system handle everything in one game, while another host may decide to control everything himself in another game.
Since those 2 scenarios basically correspond to OMGUS and TL (by what was discussed recently here), it should be able to happen.

That's my design problem, how to let one use case (e.g creating a game) determine how the system behaves in other different use cases/circumstances (e.g night phase is over).

Not to mention there may be "new" use cases that can be added just because the host wants more control.

(programming lingo and shit: )One way I can think of is having different controllers do different stuff. For instance one controller decides what to do when a night phase is over (the deadline timeout interrupts him for instance).
However, we can create a new controller that decides what to do in that situation in a different way.
Each game can have one of these controllers (i.e it's not a controller defined by the system), and these controllers are created when a game is created.
If the host wants control, Controller 1 is created and used. If the host wants less control, Controller 2 is created and used (of course both of them implement an interface, that way other components can use its methods without knowing which specific controller is being used).

Does this sound like a viable solution? Because to be honest it seems too simple to be true lol.

On November 21 2012 07:58 gonzaw wrote:
If you guys could tell me what you'd 100% want here in TL (at least initially) then it'd be a good start (since I'm analyzing the use cases back in OMGUS).

For instance, I take it all of you would agree on letting a bot do some stuff. But for instance would you guys want that bot creating the threads and day posts? Would you want that bot checking signups?
How much control do you guys want the host to have over these things?
Do you want the host to do them manually, let the bot do them but only with authorization from the host in every step, or just let the bot do everything?
Which aspects of the game would you want this to be applied? (creating day posts, counting votes, resolving night actions, etc).
Or at least which aspects of the game do you think it could be applied to (so I cover all possibilities in my system)?

On November 21 2012 08:52 Acrofales wrote:
Well, that's part of the learning process. Things like the html parser are going to be useful in any case, as is the interface with the forum (such as posting a message, or opening a thread or pm).

Also, what do you, personally want to get out of this project?

On November 21 2012 11:33 Coagulation wrote:
you can make anything commercial.. all you gotta do is slap some titties and ass on it.

On November 21 2012 11:58 kitaman27 wrote:


At the very least, you have something to slap on your resume if things work out. Basically every software engineering interview I've ever been a part of has involved someone asking me to describe a project that I have worked on outside of the required schoolwork (and I'd never have a good answer because I'm lazy :p)

On November 21 2012 14:22 Mr. Wiggles wrote:

I think Coag's on to something here. Let's name it Miss Sexy Mafia Bot. While helping you host, it also whispers sweet nothings into your ear and provides titillating entertainment.

Sorry for not being too too active yet in helping with this. I'm waiting for things to calm down a bit at school (I have been busy lately) before I start really getting into this. So, I won't be too huge a help for a couple of weeks.

One thing though, but couldn't you just break everything up into different sub-systems? I don't have too much experience in software design, but this seems like it would be relatively easy, and it would be easy to use/not use certain parts of the system if so desired.

I guess I'm just a little confused by what you mean when you say you want to make the "System" first. It seems like you could just make a Vote Count system that can either work on its own or send information to a Night Post system which again could work with just the Vote Count System, or could be controlled by some kind of Game Handler, etc. So that way you start out with basic functions, and then incorporate them into the larger system, with each tier automating more and more of the game, but the possibility of easily having each sub-section of the system able to be used in isolation or without other parts of the system. It seems like you don't want to go this route though, so I'm curious as to what you mean when you want to make the "system" first and then fill in the functions.

Just curious as to how you'd like to exactly design and build this thing :p