Play By Post Gaming Core
 

What does this do?
On its own this mod does NOTHING. It provides the Admin CP interface and common code for Play by post games.

What can I use it for?
There are two reasons why you might want to isntall this mod. The first and most common is that you wish to install one or more Play by post games for your forums. The second is that you want to develop your own play by post game.

What exactly IS play by post gaming/games?
The idea of a play by post game is that it is a game played by one or more of your forum members within a thread of your forum. A player makes a move by making a post containing the details of the move that they wish to make. As an example, take the chess plugin; this allows two members to play a game of chess beween them, each player in turn posts the piece they wish to move and where they want it to move to. The thread output gets turned into a chess board so that other members can see the game.

Features

• Admin CP interface to configure games.
• Admin CP interface to configure stats from games.
• Allows assigning of games to forums.
• When posting a new thread, members can pick between avaliable games to play.

Installation
1. Upload contents of upload folder.
2. Import product.
3. Find, download and install at least one PBPG compatible game.
4. Configure game and assign it to at least 1 forum.
5. I recomend turning off bbcode, smilies, images and post count in the forums you assign games to.

Uninstallation
1. Edit any forum with a configuration assigned; remove all the configurations.
2. Use the clear threads option (beta 2+) against each configuration to remove the config from threads. (the threads will revert to being normal forum threads)
3. Delete all configurations.
4. Uninstall all pbpg plugins.
5. Uninstall this product.

Changelog

• 4.0-0.1 b4
  • Added statistics management tool. Any plugins which provide statistics can be managed by this tool, mapping stats into user profile fields.
  • Added some admin help to some areas; some work still needed.
  • Added comms support. This includes the basic tools for plugins to communicate with each other and store state.
• 4.0-0.1 b3
  • Added install lib to simplify and unifiy plugin install code.
• 4.0-0.1 b2
  • Changed select box to checkboxes for enabling plugins.
  • Added clear threads option to configuration to remove it from any threads its enabled on.
  • Product drops its own tables on uninstall.
• 4.0-0.1 b1
  • Fixed bug with javascript in IE.
• 4.0-0.1 a3
  • Added safety check to delete configuration. You can no longer delete a configuration thats in use.
  • Added a common directory for scripts and images common to one or more pbp game.
  • Fixed a bug that occured in threads that go beyond a single page when you are not viewing the last page.
• 4.0-0.1 a2
  • Added ability to delete configurations
  • Phrased admin cp elements. (if anyone notices any missing let me know)
  • Cleaned up install code
  • Added uninstall code to revert changes to vbulletin tables only
  • Added redirect/error messages
• 4.0-0.1 a1
  • Initial release

Notes

• YOU MUST INSTALL AT LEAST ONE GAME FOR THIS MOD TO WORK. Games are posted in separate threads; I'll use the first post to keep a list of all the games that are avaliable.
• If you intend to develop your own game, the API isn't finished or fixed yet, so hold fire for a while :) I'll also be putting some docs into the thread to assist with this.
• Contents of ref folder in the zip are for referance, they list uploaded files and the database changes made in case you want to remove the mod.
• Install lib file has been moved; some older versions of plugins may fail to find it, if this is the case update to the latest version of the plugin.

List of (and links to) Free PBP games

• Chess
• Tournaments and Ladders (I know its not exactly a game but still...)
• Checkers

List of (and links to) Commercial PBP games
-None-

Games in planning/development stages

• Othelo/Reversi
• Go
• Backgammon
• ...

Poker is also in my to do list, but its somewhat more tricky to implement (the number of different types + rules played makes it complex to start with, not to mention the fact that it can have many players in a game) so is currently last.

Looks very interesting. I will try it out once compatible games are available for it.
You might consider converting coroner's games to PBP games.

demo?

You can take a look at my vb4 public dev board; vb4.giveupalready.com (chess forum) Thats one of the games that this mod supports; I'll be releasing that in a few hours once i've got the critical bugs out :)

Yeah I might tag this to see what games come out in the near future. looks interesting tho. thanks.

I just released a chess mod; not sure what else i'll release, but i'm hoping other developers will release some games as well, at least once i've got some docs for the code written up :)

I also want to write a leagues and torunaments addon for this. (At the moment its a case of soooo much coding soooo little time :p)

yeah I know how you feel ^^ Thanks for the Chess release.

What kind of games do you think developers will be able to make for this kind of platform?

Pretty much any game which is turn based will work on this platform; chess is one example, poker is another. If someone had the time and desire, they could even code up something huge and massive along the lines of the space empires series. My personal list of games i'd like to create when i've got time is:

Chess (done but needs more features adding)
Checkers (pretty much the same code so seems silly not to add)
Poker (may take quite a while as poker is a fairly complex game)
Something based off my sites RP system, however this may remain private, depending on if I can release the RP system or not... (its based off the rpg integration hack released here for vb2, heavilly modified by sucessive generations of coders on my site)

Released updated version. Not a critical update it just cleans up various areas (phrases, deleting, redirect messages, install/uninstall code)