Dear all, I am writing an application in Python for an experiment in Experimental Economics.
For those who do not know what this is: experimental economics uses controlled, computerised lab experiments with real subjects, putting the subject in a game mimicking the situation of interest and collecting behavioural data about choices made. Hence, experiments involve the use of a multi-client architecture with one server, and are sort of online games, with actions taken by clients and computation, data collection, etc... handled by servers. I chose to use Python because I needed something flexible, powerful and easy - I am a beginner programmer. My game is a sort of scrabble, with palyers buying letters and producing words or extending existing words. I use a pipe to ispell -a for spellcheck, XMLRPC for the server-client infrastructure, and have developed all the rules of the game as server functions, called by a client. States of players and of words created are stored in instances of two basic classes, Player and Word, on the server side. The problem I now face is to organise turns. Players, as in Scrabble, will play in turns. So far I have developed the server and ONE client, and cannot get my head round to - nor find many examples of - how to simply develop a turn-based interaction. I basically need the server to freeze in writing all the clients while client i is playing, then when i is over passing the turn to i+1; clients are still accessible by the server at any time (the payoff of a player changes even as she is not playing, by royalties collected from other players extending her words). In another thread (about a battleship game) I found two possible leads to a solution: 1. using 'select'. 2. using threads. But in both cases I could not find any clear documentation on how to do this. The 'select' road was said to be the easiest, but I found no further hints. Does anyone have any hints? thanks! -- Paolo Crosetto --------------------------------------------------------------------- PhD Student in Economics DEAS - Department of Economics - University of Milan --------------------------------------------------------------------- -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
