Go Siege Manual

Go Siege has been tested on the following platforms:

Go Siege requires the following software to run:

Here is a list of Microsoft® Windows installers for this software. You should install it in this order.

The Monolithic Windows Distribution package is a .zip file that contains a ready-to-run distribution of Go Siege by including Python, Twisted, PyGTK and the GTK runtime. To use, simply unzip it in your favorite archiving application (like WinZip) and run the file gosiege.bat. The distribution includes a prebuilt server. To start the server, run the file start_server.bat.

This section describes installing Go Siege from a source archive. If you are using Microsoft® Windows, you will need to open a command prompt and include the Python installation directory (usually C:\Python23) by typing the command PATH=C:\Python23.

To install Go Siege on Gentoo Linux, download the ebuild, unpack it to your portage tree, and emerge it.

	# Assuming gosiege-ebuild-0.3.tar.gz is in /home/foo/.
	cd /usr/portage
	tar -xzf gosiege-ebuild-0.3.tar.gz
	emerge gosiege -p
	emerge gosiege
      

The Gentoo packages installs a script gosieged into /etc/init.d that can control a single Go Siege server. The server can be started by running /etc/init.d/gosieged start and stopped with /etc/init.d/gosieged stop. A sample server is installed into /etc/gosiege. To make the server startup and shutdown with the system, run rc-update add gosieged default. See the ‘Initscripts’ chapter of the Gentoo Handbook for more information.

The most common problem is an incorrectly configured GTK+ runtime environment. Use the following procedure to fix it.

To avoid confusion, any words that are defined here and are meant to mean their definition here are emphasized.

Players share a board and may strategically place stones onto it, creating units . By placing a stones adjacent to another player's units, you can reduce their liberty count . When a unit's liberty count reaches zero, it is removed from the board. Each player that had stones adjacent to the unit receive points equal to the product of the fraction of adjacent stones they controlled and the number of stones in the unit. It is better to have a higher score.

In this figure, the red unit will be captured by if the blue player places a stone on the highlighted position.

Figure 3.6. Unit Capture

In this figure, if the blue player places a stone on the highlighted position, the green unit will be captured. The blue player's score will increase by 2/6*2 = 0.66 points and the red player by 4/6*2 = 1.32 points.

Figure 3.7. Scoring

Giving each player a separate turn in Go Siege would not be possible when there are many players. Having no turns and allowing players to place stones asynchronously discourages strategy and encourages players to madly place stones before the other players do.

Go Siege's solution is to limit the rate at which players can place stones. After a player places a stone on the board, a duration set by the server administrator must elapse before he can place another.

The server administrator may choose to disable Limits on his server.

Units begin to rot over time and they eventually die and are taken off the board. Adding new stones to an old unit does not slow down the rotting process. This rule was designed to prevent the board from being filled with stones.

The server administrator may choose to switch Turns off on his server.

Some stone patterns (like the one shown below) allow players to fall into an infinite loop and capture a very large number of stones very quickly. The rule of Ko prevents players from exploiting this situation by not allowing any move that will reset the board's previous state.

This rule is not yet implemented in Go Siege.

The login dialog allows you to connect to a Go Siege server. The values are persistent and stored in ~/.gosiege on POSIX and in the registry (in “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Go Siege\\0.0”) on Microsoft® Windows.

Figure 4.1. Login Dialog

Here are the meanings of the values:

This window allows you to interact with the board and access the high scores and server information dialogs.

Figure 4.2. Board Window

Colours

Go Siege is designed to allow hundreds of players to play together simultaneously. Giving each player a different stone colour is impractical because the shades will be too subtle and become indistinguishable from one another. The Four colour theorem states that every possible geographical map can be coloured with at most four colors in such a way that no two adjacent regions receive the same color. Go Siege uses this idea to colour units using only a few colours. Different units that belong to the same player may be coloured differently.

However, knowing which player controls various units is also an important part of the gameplay. The Go Siege client allows you to see which units belong to the same player by highlighting all the units owned by a player when the mouse pointer hovers over one of the player's stones.

In this figure, all the translucent stones belong to the same players.

Figure 4.3. Player Highlight

Although the two highlighted units are of different colour, they belong to the same player.

Because the unit configuration is constantly changing, the stones are recoloured whenever the board changes. This means that sometimes, units may suddenly change to a different colour.

The stones that belong to you are always blue and are not highlighted when the mouse pointer hovers over them.

Placing Stones

You can place a stone on the board simply by clicking on the intersection onto which you wish to place your stone. If limits have been activated on the server, you will see a ghost stone will become real as soon as the rule allows. While your stone is still a ghost, you change its position by placing a stone somewhere else.

Figure 4.4. Ghost Stones

Chat

If the server has chat enabled, players can talk to each other from the client. The chat system uses Unicode so different languages can be mixed.

Figure 4.5. Chat

Autoscroll

You can activate autoscroll by pressing the middle mouse button on the board. Autoscroll works in a similar way to Mozilla Firebird and Microsoft® Internet Explorer's autoscroll. After autoscroll has been activated, the board moves in the direction of your mouse pointer at a velocity proportional to the distance between your mouse pinter and the autoscroll cursor. You can exit autoscroll mode by pressing any mouse button.

Figure 4.6. The Autoscroll Cursor

The high scores dialog shows you the usernames and scores of the players with the five highest scores on the server.

Figure 4.7. High Scores Dialog

The server information dialog shows you the server's settings. The following fields will always be present:

Figure 4.8. Server Information Dialog

gosiege_serverinfo host[:port] 

gosiege_serverinfo is a console program that retrieves information from a Go Siege server and then prints it to the display. The information is the same as that given in the ‘Server Information’ dialog (see the section called “Server Information”).

Go Siege can add simple artificial intelligence players to the game when there are few real players online. Currently, they can be outwitted quite easily by even casual players although new players will need some time to form strategies to defeat them.

The server keeps a journal of all changes to the board and the player database in a file. This is useful because if the server crashes for some reason, the game can be restored to the point of the last entry in the journal.

When the server starts, if there is data in the journal file, it is used to restore the state of the game. When the server is cleanly stopped, the game state is stored in the file qosiege-shutdown.tap and the journal is cleared.

Here are the options you can pass to “mktap gosiege” when creating your server: