Nu Replayer returns

After nearly a year of downtime, Nu Replayer returns with some much needed progress to indicate that it is not dead. Granted, it is still not finished even after all this downtime, but last month, I had written a parser that could reliably parse nearly any turn.

As a result, I've promoted the project to the status of Alpha. As of this post, I am currently sitting on Alpha Build 2.

Although an Alpha build is available for download on the Challenger Planets site for Windows, it currently has only an historical game, Beta 2, viewable. Even then, many turns are missing, although I am gradually adding in new turns.

Here's a sample URL, utilizing the load turn call: http://api.planets.nu/game/loadturn?gameid=33876&playerid=28&turn=122

Having a dedicated starmap API with all that information would also cut down on processing times. Right now, processing a 11-12 player turn takes about 2.5 minutes, whereas processing a 30-player turn takes about 7 minutes. If it's the first time a game has been parsed and it utilizes a custom map (which nearly every game does nowadays), then another minute is necessary to create the territorial mapping.

Edit: Kedalion beat me to it. Never hurts to have an extra example, however

I can start building a replay of the Taurus War (as soon as it finishes, of course) based on what I currently have at my disposal. As per above, I still have to manually download turn files, but I have a processor that can take care of the files I download (albeit not very efficiently).

If it wasn't for what I can do, this program would still be in Pre-Alpha. Furthermore, the generally favorable feedback encourages me to try to beat the odds and get it out of Alpha and into Beta. Still need to do some more research on zlib, however.

It doesn't help that my first language was BASIC. Learning the relative compatibility, and free and libre, with FreeBASIC (and it's supreme support for QBasic), I switched to using FreeBASIC as my main language.

In the past, I successfully compiled a few of my other FreeBASIC programs in GNU/Linux using Trisquel 4.0, but it appears that using an older version may be required to get this one to work.

FB 0.20 had been the best for me for quite a while, especially considering that 0.21 disrupted my abilities to work on more complex programs (causing end-of-program crashes or freezes notably).

Edit: Oh. I had significant interest in the Scorpius War, so I started composing a full story and statistics for that, and to further improve my story-telling for when I need it in the future, I'm also composing a story for the Taurus as well. I probably won't do a story for Sagittarius, however, although I may still track stats

I've noticed, according to Cheeseball 0014, that players who have opted to hide their turns (which is understandable) or delete their accounts (very easy to accidentally pull off) create holes in the Nu Replayer's starmap.

Whenever I try to download and parse turns for Orkney World 0014, the first two slots give this output, despite being dead: {"success":false,"error":"Player account does not exist."}.

Y'all are making my brain leak out my ears.

But that's COOOOOL!

WoW!

That's the original map too.....