A number of changes have been introduced to support the new game clock. This is based on the Fischer clock which was originally developed for Chess (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_clock). The overall concept is that this will improve realtime play by providing an incentive to take turns quickly and punish those who always take the maximum amount of time to take a turn.

You will notice this option when creating and joining new games and these games are also identified with a new clock icon in the game lists. When creating or joining a game there are three parameters which define the clock:

1. Initial Time - this is a bonus time allocation given to the player at the start of the game. It could be zero (and probably will be in many cases).

2. Delay Time - this is the amount of time given to the player at the start of each turn. It is added to the remaining time on their clock.

3. Clock Limit - this is the maximum number of minutes allowed on the clock and is applied after the Delay time has been added at the start of a players turn. For now this has been set to maximum 60 minutes, this may be revised upwards depending on feedback.

The key difference is that at the end of each turn any time that you have not used is retained for your next turn. For example, if player A has 8 minutes on their clock and takes 2 minutes to take their turn, at the end of their turn they will have 8 - 2 = 6 minutes remaining on their clock. If the delay time is 3 minutes then at the start of the next turn they will get 6 + 3 = 9 minutes on their clock.

To support the above changes the clock for each player now dynamically updated inside the player bar so you can track other player's game clocks. This feature also extends to games with regular clocks.

Please provide feedback on this feature on this thread. I anticipate that it may take a little tweaking before it's working smoothly.

I am so psyched to see this in action!

noticed something peculiar with the growls that prolly ties to this update.

never had an issue with growls popping up before like some did. and since i wrote this in other thread (damn copy/paste didn't work) i think i found the trigger.

I usually have 3 tabs open in IE (my games, forum, tourney). i took all my current turns, but every time i did something on that tab, i'd get a growl showing it was my turn in the 2 games i just took. any update, page refresh or change in state (list, to player, to message on another game). However, after going to the tourney page (which hadn't had a chance for a refresh) where it still showed 2 turns waiting, i updated that page, which resolved the issue.

So it seems the growls are now popping up if there's another active window/tab that shows old turn status (either that or it took that same amount of time - few minutes - to clear itself up)

just starting to test, first bug:

settings for the game: 1,1,10

final email after getting booted semi-on purpose:

10th Jan 2012 @ 15:17 .:. You turn has been skipped in the game 'new game clock test'
Your turn has been automatically skipped in the game 'new game clock test'.
To avoid your turn being skipped in future, please make sure you take your turn before the turn limit has elapsed. For this game the turn limit is 3 days.
Two successive skips in the same game will result in an automatic boot.

more questions:

same set up (1,1,10)

only thing i see on the turn timer column is a count down from 2:37 - which happens to get reset every time i reload the page. seems turn ends (appropriately?) when that timer goes to 0.

can't see their timer move at all, and page doesn't seem to update automatically until that timer is empty, tho if manually reload it will go into placement mode. also means the growls aren't popping up until there's a page refresh.

oh and if i let that 2:37 timer expire, then it never returns to my turn which ends up booting me. did it actually end my turn or was that suppposed to be correct, but the timer is just off what i expected it to be.

which results in the growl error above coming back as i can't get rid of the 1 turn waiting

growl & turn timer thing disappear if close the window (cache issue?)

I'll look into it. Which version of IE and OS are you running?

IE8, windows XP

Just noticed that fisher clock games still have the..

"Warning! This is a REAL TIME mode game. You will be automatically booted if you take more than 10 minutes to take your turn."

..message on the game page.  Other than that -- it looks great, right down to hovering over the icon..  Haven't played a game with it yet.

Played a game with the Fischer and it works very well.  weathertop's comments about the timer are valid (need refresh to see it accurately).  On turn 1 my timer kept counting down even though my turn was over.

Also noticed that regular clock games have a count-up timer that keeps going.

I'll try debugging on my IE8 VM. Historically IE8 has a whole new set of issues to every other browser :)

The turn timer should count up for Regular clock games.

In this game: http://www.wargear.net/games/player/120868

I'm getting a growl "Your game has started" each time it is my turn.

I'm also getting this growl and the "your turn" growl whenever I open up a new tab in Chrome.

EDIT: Also getting the growls whenever I open up the player, even though it is not my turn.

AttilaTheHun wrote:

In this game: http://www.wargear.net/games/player/120868

I'm getting a growl "Your game has started" each time it is my turn.

I'm also getting this growl and the "your turn" growl whenever I open up a new tab in Chrome.

EDIT: Also getting the growls whenever I open up the player, even though it is not my turn.

Today I got this growl bug too (update and it corrects, but then re-growls that I have a turn in this game, update and correct, re-growl, etc), and it seemed particular to

http://www.wargear.net/games/player/119296

I am using FF 9.0.1 and it seems unrelated to the new clock. (I am currently in no such clocked games.) I also logged out, came back, and persisted!

I just noticed that the lowest unit for the delay clock is 1 minute. It's going to be board dependent, but for any board where a single move can be made quickly, a 1 minute delay is ENORMOUS. If 40 moves are made, that's 40 minutes added to the clock just from the delay. And yet, with a 0 minute delay, it can become a race to just be ahead on time, so it's nice to have a delay.

Traditionally (the aforementioned chess clocks), the delay timer is measured in seconds. 

Hugh wrote:

I just noticed that the lowest unit for the delay clock is 1 minute. It's going to be board dependent, but for any board where a single move can be made quickly, a 1 minute delay is ENORMOUS. If 40 moves are made, that's 40 minutes added to the clock just from the delay. And yet, with a 0 minute delay, it can become a race to just be ahead on time, so it's nice to have a delay.

Traditionally (the aforementioned chess clocks), the delay timer is measured in seconds. 

Hugh wrote:

Today I got this growl bug too (update and it corrects, but then re-growls that I have a turn in this game, update and correct, re-growl, etc), and it seemed particular to

http://www.wargear.net/games/player/119296

I am using FF 9.0.1 and it seems unrelated to the new clock. (I am currently in no such clocked games.) I also logged out, came back, and persisted!

Thanks Hugh I have an idea how to prevent this. Just to be clear, what exactly do you mean by 'update and correct'? Is it definitely the same growl reappearing (i.e. you have not taken your turn / it is not your turn)?

tom wrote:

Hugh wrote:

I just noticed that the lowest unit for the delay clock is 1 minute. It's going to be board dependent, but for any board where a single move can be made quickly, a 1 minute delay is ENORMOUS. If 40 moves are made, that's 40 minutes added to the clock just from the delay. And yet, with a 0 minute delay, it can become a race to just be ahead on time, so it's nice to have a delay.

Traditionally (the aforementioned chess clocks), the delay timer is measured in seconds. 

What should the lowest limit be do you think?

If you consider boards like Roshambo -- where you don't even have to think much about strategy, 20 seconds barely seems short enough; but this type of board is not the norm.    I suppose Go-Geared moves can be made just as quickly.

What happens to the clocks when the site slows down?  Do clocks time out if a packet doesn't make it to the server in time?

What happens if a player has started their turn (i.e., placed units, or made an attack) and the clock runs out? I hope their turn is automatically ended with no further penalty.  If this is the case, then even 10 second increments seems possible, but my gut says 20 or 30 second increments would be very reasonable.

In fact ..it could actually be cool.  Consider a game with a 20 or 30 second clock on a standard map (or even large map like colossal crusade) where players don't have enough time to make all the moves they want, so they simply play until their clocks run out..

Right now the skipping / booting behavior is  the same - so when you start running out of time you will get booted. Perhaps this should be changed so that if a player has started their turn they are just skipped, but never booted?

The skip/boot script runs every 10 seconds at the moment, this could probably be dropped to every 5 seconds but below that it might start impacting performance. The clocks are all based on the time on the server so if the engine can't respond in time it will still skip / boot the players.

I think maybe 10s could be the shortest delay time possible.

tom wrote:

Hugh wrote:

Today I got this growl bug too (update and it corrects, but then re-growls that I have a turn in this game, update and correct, re-growl, etc), and it seemed particular to

http://www.wargear.net/games/player/119296

I am using FF 9.0.1 and it seems unrelated to the new clock. (I am currently in no such clocked games.) I also logged out, came back, and persisted!

Thanks Hugh I have an idea how to prevent this. Just to be clear, what exactly do you mean by 'update and correct'? Is it definitely the same growl reappearing (i.e. you have not taken your turn / it is not your turn)?

I've patched the growl code. You should never see the same growl twice within the same browser window. However you should expect to see the same growls repeated in every browser that you have open to a WarGear page.