Hello everybody,
so there is this mobile application,
Draw Something, which follows an interesting turn-based model where players do their turn and then can just drop the game for as long as they wish and continue whenever their turn comes again. The great thing about this is that the game can be played intermittently and go on for as long as the players want it to.
The idea hit me that playing good old Heroes 3 this way would be great, but afaik there is no version of the game that can do this, so my idea was to use an old spare PC and turn it into a Heroes 3 server of sorts.
The problem is that the players would disconnect after completing their turn, in which case Heroes 3 gives over the command of their units to an AI. Finally I came up with the idea of putting a lightweight linux distro on the spare PC and adding several virtualbox Windows xp (or 98) installations on it, then networking them and giving each player remote access to one of the virtual machines which would actually be running the game.
The problem is I have no experience doing these things, so before I go digging up old PCs I would like some input on this. I can figure out how to network Virtualbox machines together but that's about it, so my questions are:
1. What are the minimum pc specs for this, the machine would have to run 2-3 virtualbox instances simultaneously, my guess is about 256-512MB RAM per instance + 512MB for the linux host, so 2GB minumum? And how are processor cores used by the virtual machines? Do they need dedicated cores or could a single core AMD Athlon II clocked at 3GHz handle it? And what about graphics?
2. What software can I use to give remote access to the virtual machines? It should be something that can run on linux and windows both over lan. If there is an android version that would be just awesome too.
Also just to mention, I have considered using only one windows box, hotseat and remote access, but that we are trying to avoid since it would cause a lot of confusion and unavoidably reveal other player's map/resources whenever ending a turn.
So thank you in advance for the answers, and if anyone brainstorms an additional suggestion feel free to post it.
