Regarding GNOME Games on-line multiplayer social gaming network

[Jordi Mas <jmas softcatala org>]

Hello everybody,

* Background

In the past weeks I have been thinking of what I can do to make gbrainy 
a multiplayer game.  Unfortunately, GNOME Games only had GGZ[1] support 
at some extended, a project that is basically discontinued. After a very 
long time, it did not work sorry.

I have been exposed lately to the Apple Game Center [2] and I was been 
very impress by their social abilities: finding gamers on-line, list of 
friends, mutiplayer games, etc.

Since GNOME as a community driven project, I think that we should 
leverage stronger on the social aspect of gaming for users.

During the last days I have been looking at what other people is doing 
in the open source space.I liked what the KDE guys are doing. They put 
together / push for a nice open social API [3] and they are implementing 
this as part this API as part of their Gluon effort [4] and they are 
opening a Web site for catalyzing the on-line community[5]. I talked to 
these guys over IRC and GamingFreedom is only going to have Gluon games, 
but they have been very friendly and if we have a proposal we definitely 
can talk to them.

* What I'm proposing

Basically that we start a discussion on how we envision an on-line 
multiplayer social gaming network for GNOME, who is interested in 
helping and what are next steps.

* In my opinion

One possibility is to consider using Open Collaboration Services [3], 
complete the current gtk friendly implementation[6], enable GNOME Games 
to use it and host a server in a public place. All of this looking as 
much collaboration as possible with other communities.

* What I'm considering for gbrainy

In the short term, I'm considering adding multiplayer support without a 
central server. Using Avahi [7] to find server or giving an IP and then 
making multiplayer possible using Open Collaboration Services API and 
using on the gbrainy clients as LAN server.

I'm interested in knowing your thoughts, specially on the GNOME Games area.

Regards,

Jordi,

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GGZ_Gaming_Zone
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Center
[3] 
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/open-collaboration-services
[4] http://gluon.gamingfreedom.org/
[5] http://www.gamingfreedom.org/
[6] http://gtk-apps.org/content/show.php?content=126812
[7] http://avahi.org/
--
Jordi Mas i Hernàndez. Bloc: http://gent.softcatala.org/jmas/bloc/
Planet Softcatalà -> http://planeta.softcatala.org