Networking some gnome games

[Andreas Røsdal <andrearo stud ntnu no>]

Hi Callum,

This might be a slightly late reply, but I hope I still can help out
improving the networked games in gnome-games, which still is on the
TODO-list of gnome-games.

I've had a close look at the networking code in iagno (from CVS), and it
seems like a very good starting point for adding networking to some of the
other games. I'd like to reuse most of the network code from it, in other
games, like gnibbles. Parts of the networking code could be generalized.

Iagno contacts a simple meta-server written in python (called
iagno-server.py), and provides a mean for one iagno client to connect to
another iagno server. I'd like to generalize this metaserver to be able
to handle more users, and handle several games (iagno, gnibbles etc.)

However, this metaserver is hardcoded in iagno, so the meta-server is a
single point of failure, which is bad. This should be configurable.
Sometime later, I'd like to also add a LAN-mode, using UDP multicast to
find games on the LAN as well.

So this is my suggestion, will you accept a patch if I implement it?

Andreas Røsdal




> On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Callum McKenzie wrote:
>> One of the important things about networking games is that it should
>> "just work", unfortunately there are two different competing scenarios:
>> LANs, where you can just look around your local network for another
player
>> The Internet, where you have to explicitly enter the other players
>>  or find a game server.
>>
>>
>> I believe Iagno does the former (but I haven't looked very closely at
the
>> networking code). Before you get too deep in code it would probably be
a
>> good idea to run the general idea of what you want to do by me. Also,
it
>> may not pay to work on gataxx since I intend merging large chunks of
>> iagno and gataxx together. Gnibbles might be the most interesting one
>> to work on (although having four players might make it difficult). If
>> you want to do stuff with gnect, Tim Musson <trmusson ihug co nz>, its
>> author, is still fairly active and you may want to talk to him.