Resources for beginners II : Using dropbox and H2HH

[raz_atoth]

As the name says it's PBEM.Play by email. While exchanging turns by email worked just fine back in the old days of CMx1 you'll quickly find out that-despite the name- it's easier to send and receive your turns using alternative methods.
Why? Because the file sizes are huge. It isn't unusual to see ,even in medium battles, files as large as 15-20 MB. Some email service providers limit the size of the files you are allowed to attach. And even if they don't, having to email such big files is in itself a pain.

One alternative to email is dropbox. Dropbox is a free service [in the limit of 2 GB] that allows you to share your files. It's quite popular in the cmbn community so i suggest you familiarize with it if you're planning to do any serious business with cmbn ;) Especially since it's integrated with another tool called H2HH which will automate the process of sending and receiving turns.

Dropbox can be downloaded from here: https://www.dropbox.com/install

The first screen that you'll see when trying to install dropbox is the one below. Most likely you don't already have a dropbox account so select 'I don't have a dropbox account' and click Next. You will be prompted to input your email/password associated with the account.



The second screen will let you choose how much space you need. Unless you have a very good reason,the 2GB dropbox offers for free should be more than plenty for your cmbn games.



On the third screen you can decide how the dropbox settings should be handled. If you're fine with the default settings you can go with 'Typical'. For this tutorial i chosed 'Advanced' because i want to be able to specify the folder dropbox should use for storing the files rather than use the default one.





That's pretty much it. If everything went smooth you should see the dropbox icon in the system's tray.