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I was curious why you had sided with using an os function to perform the turn processing as opposed to a purely php solution?

The reason I used cron, as opposed to just writing it in...

The original version didn't have much of a player base, but I wanted the turns to trigger off no matter whether anyone was on or not, not to mention, I wanted to eliminate any possible overhead I could. Also, during the later part of when I ran Promisance solely, there were 2 physical machines running it. One did all the web work, the other did the database only, at that time, using cron instead of writing it into Promisance directly, was just a better idea since I could divide it up better.

The original 2 servers were only Athlon K6-2 450s with a whopping 256mb of ram in both, on IDE drives, so trying to squeak out any performance I could out of my own programming, was a must. At the time, I relied more on the system clocks (which synced themselves daily) than hoping someone was hitting the web site at the "fire off time".

Granted, with the speed of computers now, that's nowhere NEAR an issue, but at the time, with the hardware I was using for the servers, it was a big issue. (As it was, it took anywhere from 3-5 minutes to complete the daily "cron run" with about 1000 accounts). In comparison, I have 2 machines right here in front of me now... one is an Athlon 1ghz with 512mb of RAM running Windows 2000 Pro. The other (the one I'm typing this from) is a P3 733 with 256mb of RAM, running Gentoo Linux.

So, that's why I used the OS function, of cron in this case, instead of processing it via a PHP solution. It was a PHP "solution", it just fired off via cron.

Forum software (like Invision) aren't "time sensitive", like Promisance is. If a forum e-mail isn't sent right away, or in 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc, it's not going to globally "break everything", where with Promisance, if it misses one turn run, everybody gets affected by it. Not to mention, most forum software fires off an e-mail as soon as a post is replied to :)

Maybe you can give us a history class as to the creation and metamorphoses the game has gone through? How many versions are out there (that you know of)? Other interesting facts we should know?

I'll try to make it short, but here it is in a "Cliff Notes" version :)

It all started in 1997, when myself and two friends, after playing Earth: 2025 for some time, were sitting around playing Final Fantasy 7 (we kept trying to beat each other's snowboarding times) and got to thinking "We could do so much better", especially since, at that time, the administrators were never around and rarely, if ever, made a "public appearance" (similar to myself as of late, but this was from the beginning).

In mid-1998, I finally got around to starting to write it, which was started in Visual Basic 5. After some massive headaches trying to get it working (I had no database knowledge or file storage knowledge at all at the time), it was scrapped and I began using Perl to write it, using flat files.  During the testing period of the original Perl version, accounts kept disappearing and being wiped out, so I scratched that and started building it to use MySQL instead (which it still does to this day).

In mid-1999, I had a machine here that I hadn't used in a while, so I searched around for some inexpensive colocation rates and had found one, from a local ISP named Netwurx, but I had to take this system all the way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin (for some, that's a trip, for me, it's a half hour drive, so it wasn't that big) and it sat there for some time.

Between late 1999 and early 2001, it had it's ups and downs, as did my employment in that process (of which, I'm still looking now, rather sad actually) and in the first part of 2001, I brought that machine down permanently (which has since been LONG disassembled and all data has long since gone the way of the dodo).

Around that time is when I also made it open source to allow Promisance to live on vicariously, allowing everyone that had previously asked me if I'd ever release the source, to finally have access to it.

Since then, I've seen more incarnations of Promisance that I've lost count, and as long the credits are there and the stable source is available, more power to it!

How about arguing about cheese?

Let's not go knockin cheese now...   :lol:  

*Bows to one of the lords of Promisance*

So... what your saying is Retto has the oppertunity to leave the source code from the public untill he makes his finalized version without bugs?

Sounds fair to me.

To keep it short, sweet, and to the point - you got it.

 For the record ... (and if you don't believe I am who I say I am, feel free to e-mail me at ppurgett@users.sourceforge.net and ask)

now, after receiving an e-mail from Retto and reading it in it's entirety, I further explained my intentions with the "Promisance Public License". The reason it is the way it is, is to allow everyone and equal chance to look at and work on it ("it" being the Promisance source code). However, there have been some (and I will not point any fingers, though I could easily use both hands to count how many times I've seen it) individuals that have taken the source code, altered all the credits and other identifying information and made it their own.

That is theft. But, the way I see it, downloading the open source code, making your own alterations, then making your alterations public, then they have been completed (or at least to your best ability) (Example: Code is "pushed live", that's when), making the source code available, I have NO troubles with.

To my understanding, the devs of Redwall: Warlords have an expansion in the making and intend on making the source available when it's ready to go live, while I highly encourage sharing beta code (find bugs/problems faster, occasionally), I merely enforce that the "stable code" be made open.

Since license agreements are all about enforcement (and technically, I hold more "enforcement weight" than anyone over at QMT does) and the way I've just explained, is how I enforce it... that's the way it is.

My 2 biggest concerns when I made Promisance open source -- theft (as described above) and the credits being altered to remove my work done on the project.

That is how I enforce the Promisance source code... sure, there's ways to abuse the way I enforce it, but I tend to be notified of them in fairly short order and have it taken care of. Sometimes all it takes is a simple asking and it's done.

I don't have the funding for multiple banks of lawyers (or even 1 for that matter) and I'm not about to sweat the small stuff.

So there you have it. If anyone has any further objections to how I enforce my own software's license agreement, they can be sent to /dev/null or root@localhost.