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Show HN: Kriegspiel

krgspl.com

68 pointsbinarymax39 comments

Hi All. Server is getting absolutely pummelled right now. If you get stuck in a game, you can hit 'refresh' and it should come back. Thanks for playing!

Technicals: It is a medium EC2 running a single node process with socket.io. Database is an EC2 micro running rethinkdb.

--EDIT-- Replay functionality seems to be down entirely due to load. Games are still running though.

--EDIT2-- Replays are back up! Just need to wait a while. For those who are discouraged by the signup - I understand, but due to the nature of the game it is necessary to prevent cheating. Email is not required. Feel free to create a random string as a username and password if you want to give it a try.

Love it! And won my game :-)

Any insight on what's killing your server? I've been recently looking into socket.io's issues with scaling.

Trying to figure that out now. DB seems spiffy, and express is logging requests just fine. Thats the trivial stuff - now I need to start getting my hands dirty.

EDIT - OK serious issues now. getting a range error on redis and the call stack is blowing out, recycling node every 15 seconds or so. Will let you know when its back up.

EDIT2 - Turned out to be an exception due to an invalid date string. Fixed!

Along the same lines, what are some of the metrics of your traffic that caused socket.io to choke (total connections, # concurrent, etc)?

or was it the other pieces in your stack that caused the bottleneck.

BTW, great idea.

>For those who are discouraged by the signup - I understand, but due to the nature of the game it is necessary to prevent cheating.

Can you please elaborate on why you believe signup is necessary to prevent cheating?

Sure - because if you can spoof someone's username while they are playing, you can see their moves :)

Wouldn't a secure cookie be enough for this?

Yes good point - I might be able to make that work if I spent the time to perfect it, but I'm not a security guy so there was the off chance I might overlook something.

There were couple other good reasons for the signup given my initial target demographic of two people :). And you may have also noticed that everyone gets an Elo rating if you visit /spielers.html

As a side project I weighed the options and just chose to have signups rather than complicate the issue. They can be purely anonymous, and it makes it easier for me to manage. If it is really a stopping point for losing potential players I am willing to live with that.

On a side note - I'm very glad to see you are enjoying the game. You've played almost as many games as me in 1/100th the time!

>On a side note - I'm very glad to see you are enjoying the game. You've played almost as many games as me in 1/100th the time!

Yes I really like it! I hope you will be able to keep enough players around.

Hello! I've been sitting on this for awhile. I mostly built it so my cousin and I could play against each other (both long time fans of the classic variant). The source is here: https://github.com/binarymax/kriegspiel

Hey, I just want to say: good for you to develop your thing and show it off on HN and make the source available. It takes a little bravery.

Awesome game, but you could make two imporvments:

1. Add a turn indicator or a "waiting for opponent" message of some sort.

2. Make it clear in-site that you can refresh and still get the same game.

There is a 'wait/move' indicator at the top left. Its faded text though so not immediately noticable.

Definitely need to improve the instructions - such as your second point. Also the game-join logic is kinda wacky.

Thanks for the feedback - really glad you like it!

3. Clarify the timeout. I have 3 games running in which the opponent is not responding. Do I win? Also, is there a score?

The up-front requirement to create an account put me right off.

Well, at least it doesn't require an email so it's just the username and password.

German here:

You're technically missing an second s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_(wargame)

Yes you are right. You know us crazy Americans. My apologies for the misspelling! The chess variant is typically spelled with one 's':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegspiel_(chess)

Does anybody know the etymology of "Kriegspiel"? All I find are references to "Kriegsspiel" but nobody explains where the 's' went. Was it just a misspelling by those who popularized it?

It's a lot harder (for me) to say Kriegsspiel than (the incorrect) Kriegspiel, because the first 's' is voiced (IPA /z/) and the 'sp' is unvoiced[0].

I'm not saying that's why this alternate spelling has arisen, but it could be a transcription of a mispronunciation.

[0] IPA /ʃp/ rather than /sp/ because initial 'sp' in german is pronounced that way. I don't know if this rule has a name... "post-alveolarization"?

No no, actually the first s is /s/ i.e. voiceless as in "sea" or "pass", so the complete transcription should be /kʀiːksʃpiːl/. The transition between the /s/ and /ʃ/ is then just making your lips round for the /ʃ/ after the wide and flat /s/. It is still not as easy as just leaving it out, but it is whole lot more doable.

I must be extremely out of practice with German :\ I definitely thought that the 'g' in 'Krieg' was /k/ but the 'g' in 'Kriegs' was /g/.

German is tricky that way. In this case the literal translation of "war game" does not exist because to the German ear those two words must be expressed in a way that suggests a relationship between them. The additional "s" accomplishes that, in essence the phrase becomes a contraction of Krieg's-Spiel (apostrophe added for better readability) which is a special short form that developed from "Spiel des Kriegs" or, translated, "game of war".

That said, as a project name Kriegspiel is totally fine. :)

I started working on a similar thing last year [0]. In my version, your pieces can see any spot on the board they are allowed to move to.

[0] https://github.com/valtron/fog

Too bad you didn't finish it :)