Introducing Soldat Web Gather

Hello Soldat Community,

I am here to unveil a project MM and I have been working on for several months now: The Official Soldat Web Gather.

This is much like current IRC gathers, such as the ones in #sna.gather and #soldat.mapping, except instead of relying on IRC, this gather is in your web browser utilizing AJAX and Javascript.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept of gathering: a gather is where a game with a certain number of rounds of Soldat is organized and prepared on the fly, as opposed to pubs. This is sort of like clanwars, except without the clans.
 
The servers themselves are hosted on FLAB's server located in Chicago, IL, USA.

http://soldat.thd.vg/en/gather

The in-game commands are:
 !p/!pause - Pause the game
 !up/!unpause - Unpause a paused game
 !map MAPNAME - Change the map of the current round
 !r/!restart - Restart the current round
 !unbanlast - unban last banned player

How it works:
 - Make sure you're logged in. (look at the top right corner of the site)
 - At all times there is a queue for non-running gathers.
 - When you join a queue, you are not allowed to join a queue for any other gather.
 - When the queue you are in fills up, the web browser of each member of the party emits a beep followed by a join game link.
 - The game lasts for the number of rounds specified by the website.
 - When the gather ends, you are all kicked, the server shuts down, and the queue for this gather is then emptied and ready to be filled up again.

Additionally:
 - If you are in a queue that has not yet filled up and close your browser window/tab, in 30 seconds of not returning to the page you will be removed from the queue.
 - http://soldat.thd.vg has a friends system where you can add people to your buddy list (assuming they accept your request). When one of your friends are in a gather, their name turns cyan.
 - In order to use the gather, you must be logged in. http://soldat.thd.vg uses the exact same accounts that the SoldatForums use so just use your normal username and password

What will be added in the near future:
 - Player statistics (largely just involves me copying over code from my U13 rentals panel and tweaking it slightly)
 - Possibly more in-game commands
 - More gather servers, such as ones like Realistic Inf, HTF, Rambo, and others. The way I have the logic set up, adding more gather servers is extremely easy.
 - IE support. It should currently work great in Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, etc

Thanks to:
 - Myself for writing all the code :D
 - MM for the idea and development encouragement
 - Furai (aka Wookash) for really useful suggestions on the gather's usability and pascal scripting logic
 - FliesLikeABrick for hosting and suggestions on the efficient way of doing things behind the scenes
 - The people/organizations behind PHP, Ruby, Python, Apache, Bash, MySQL, Javascript, DOM, & JSON since they are the tools I'm using

Talk to us:
 - The discussion and alpha/beta testing for the gather has been in #jrgp @ quakenet. Join the channel to chat with us live
 - Please post suggestions/ideas/bugs/etc in the Soldat Forums thread.
 
-jrgp