people keep bringing this up but nothing ever happens with it, haha!

indeed

It's a cool idea, but at the moment beyond my programming-skills.
Thought about implementing this a few times too...

Some sort of hack like greypress perhaps?

What is with grey press?

you could just make tabs for every possibility, and then like with the moves, you only see the one selected, so for classic you can click 8 tabs and with 1 you can choose between all possibilities...
i like it but it might be hard...

Think about the number of possibilities required to show every possibility. In classic:
6-players=6C6=1
5-players=6C5=6
4-players=6C4=15
3-players=6C3=20
2-players=6C2=15
1-player =6C1=6

That comes to a total of 63 possible combinations if I'm not mistaken. This number grows exponentially with the number of players. My understanding of computers is only minimal, but I'm pretty sure that even computers have problems with exponential growth. Also, it would probably take a tonne of programming.

Just an illustration of the exponential growth With 2 players, there is only one "target group" for your messages. With 3 players, there are 3 (one to each, plus one to both). With 4 players you have 3 one-player targets, 3 two-player targets (AB, AC, BC) and one 3-player target. This adds to 7. With 5 players you have 4 one-player targets, 6 two-player targets, 4 three-player targets and one 4-player target. This adds to 15.

Here is a table showing the total number of possible combinations for 2-10 players. That was as far as I could be bothered to draw Pascal's triangle:

2 players: 1 combination
3 players: 3 combinations
4 players: 7 combinations
5 players: 15 combinations
6 players: 31 combinations
7 players: 63 combinations
8 players: 127 combinations
9 players: 255 combinations
10 players: 511 combinations.

For those who are math oriented, the formula to give the number C of combinations for a total of n players is given by C=(2^(n-1))-1

I only figured out the formula after writing out all that stuff. For the 35-player WWIV map, the number of possible combinations is C=(2^34)-1=1.717986918*10^10. For Chaos or Chaoctopi, my calculator doesn't give scientific notation and the answer is
8 589 934 592. That's almost 8.6 billion.

Maybe instead, you have an options/settings, like when you go to create a game, you just pick out many players you think are in the alliance, then, in each box (like the ones you type in to log in) you type the name of the country.

Then once that is done, it recognizes the names of the countries and it creates a chat for that.

It will only create the chat if all the other players in the alliance do the same thing on their end, inputting all the same countries. The other thing, is that you can name the chat yourself for that alliance, only you see that name as the others can make their own name.

Would this be possible in some form?

Could set it up by adding something to the hyperlink? For example, when you type in:

http://vdiplomacy.com/board.php?gameID=####&msgCountryID=2

You will contact the second player. Likewise if you type as such:

http://vdiplomacy.com/board.php?gameID=####&msgCountryID=2+4+6

You will contact players 2, 4, and 6.

@adammaa: I think something close to that might be the most likely.

@KA: That might be how the syntax would work but it still would need to be coded.


I think that the easiest way might be to change the chat system all together. The way it works is that you send a message from a sender to a recipient. Rather than that you could have two new tabs: "In" and "out" (keep "global"). "In" would display messages to you, and would also include the list of recipients. "Out" is where the magic would happen. You would use some syntax similar to grey-press. Your message would start with "England, France:" and then would continue. You could also only send to one target. If you wanted to send to global, you could start with "Global:" or with nothing.

This would probably be hell to program since it involves re-building the entire chat system, but I think it would be worth it.

I also realized that my formula from earlier only gives the number of combinations that a single player could send. The total number of combinations is actually: C=n*[(2^(n-1))-1]

We could always just do it PlayDiplomacy style...

What's that style?

It's more like an e-mail that you can send out to whomever you choose. The other powers are your contacts, and you can speak as you choose.

That would definitely work. Although, it would also require a total re-working of the messaging system.