Scoreganizer

Scoreganizer is a platform for online minesweeper tournaments. As players play games, they are automatically uploaded to a central web server that validates the uploaded scores and provides tournament results. Scoreganizer consists of the website itself, and a client that automatically uploads the games; The website may be found on https://scoreganizer.net/tournaments/, and the client may be downloaded from this page on the site.

Scoreganizer has been used for numerous recent (as of late 2011) conventional tournaments, notably the World Championship 2011, UK2011, and Russia2011. It has also been used for a number of IRC Tournaments, so-called because they were organized mainly over the IRC channel, that took place completely online.

History

Scoreganizer was conceived largely as a successor to the Viennasweeper tournament manager written by Christoph Nikolaus. This software coupled Viennasweeper with a tournament manager that ran on the local network and controlled the games running on each machine. While this system worked well most of the time, the networking components were not entirely reliable - in Munich 2010, network problems prevented the use of this system entirely. Thomas Kolar decided that a major problem of the system was that it made too many assumptions about network architecture, as the system was supposed to run reliably under any assumable circumstances. This led to the idea to use only HTTP and HTTPS for communication, as these protocols are required for web browsing to work. The use of HTTP(S) made implementing the system as a web application a natural step, and the basic idea was born.

When exactly work on the project started is not known, but the first changes on record are from April 29th, 3:35 CET. The first score was successfully uploaded to the site on July 16th, 12:42 CET.

The first test run under real-life conditions was the UK2011 tournament, which was mostly a success, with the major exception that the long nickname bug surfaced during this tournament for the first time. A workaround was found, and the tournament could continue.

After that, the system was progressively improved upon leading up to the Minesweeper World Championship 2011.

At the Minesweeper World Championship 2011, Scoreganizer was used again, and mostly everything went well, with the exception of a minor bug in the client that meant that it was not used for the side event, and issues with the host computers.

Finally, Scoreganizer was used in the Russia2011 tournament without any complications after the testing phase, where a bug in a python library surfaced.

Implementation

Scoreganizer uses the home edition of Viennasweeper as its clone; The Scoreganizer client is a python script that starts Viennasweeper with a custom configuration, waits for games to be played, and subsequently uploads the replays to the server. For windows users, this script is compiled into an executable (a .exe file) that can be used without a python installation. On other systems, a python installation is assumed, as well as wine for Viennasweeper.

The server is programmed in python using the django framework.

Bugs

(to be continued)