Some concerns...

I think this is one time I would have opted to use Perl or Javascript to design this project. So far, I cannot get a good mind set about an efficient way to play this game without being online. The email program I posted saves just a little time. Downloading the move involves two problems.

1) More time wasted.

2) The chance of error.

The user should cut, paste, and upload the code to the appropriate Kriegspiel (finally got the word right) folder to continue the game. Any mistake, foul game.

This also means that the email would have to be encoded, so the user cannot simply see the opponents move. (Not hard to do, but how far do you go so people who are good at reading code will not recognize it.) For instance, you could scramble it by a date algorithm and include the date in the code so the other player's system has no trouble reading it.

OK, do you just encode and upload one move, or the whole board? If you do the whole board, you need to...

A) add the data as an attachment, more time lost (attachments cannot ever be automatically added to an email like the name, subject, and body can.)

B) add the data automatically in the body. (There may be a concatenation limit here.) This would mean more cut and paste error errors are possible.

I think the best choice is to add each move encrypted by date in the subject header. The user just needs to cut and paste it directly into a text pad for the Kriegspiel game and upload it for decoding and submission. The program could detect any corruption in the code and the user could cut and paste again if he or she messed something up.

I wish I could figure out how to hack into an email so the program itself could search out the move. (The moves could also be numbered in the encoding to make sure it hacked the right one!) Anyway, I have never figured out how to do this, not to mention the inherent encoding the files are probably kept in or how to read the info in binary. So, we are back to manual labor.

Anybody got any brighter ideas?

Pete