Re: Networking some gnome games

[Callum McKenzie <callum physics otago ac nz>]

On Mon, 2004-07-12 at 01:13 +0200, Andreas R� wrote:
> 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 R�
> 
> 

I'm open to almost any code that improves networking. Your suggestions
all seem like good ideas. 

Some points you might like to consider:

I'm going to roll the code for iagno and ataxx together, probably in the
2.9 time-frame. If you make the code general enough this won't be a
problem (and hopefully it will make it easy).

Some parts of GNOME (e.g. gnome-vfs) are starting to consider zeroconf,
it might be worth a look at.

Security is, as always, a problem. I'm not concerned about anti-cheating
measures but I certainly don't want the game to be crashed over the
network.

I'm not going to have any time to work so patches are most definitely
welcome ! :)

 - Callum