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List:       kde-games-devel
Subject:    [Kde-games-devel] Meta server concept
From:       Josef Spillner <dr_maux () maux ! de>
Date:       2001-08-10 14:33:15
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I have thought a bit on meta servers and how they could easily be integrated 
within existing games, and into the desktop (speaking of user-friendlyness).

Basically, two concepts seem to be good enough so I want to support them 
both. One of them is URI-based, the other (more complex one) is XML-based.

1. URI-based queries
This is very simple: The server receives a string like query://monopoly and 
returns something like kmonop://capsi.com:9999. I'm not sure whether every 
game should have its own type, but from the technical point that would be 
reasonable.
(I take kmonop as an example here because I already had a mini-discussion 
about that with Capzilla)

2. XML-based queries
Now, that's something where the use of KDE components is very useful. It 
sends a simple query, and receives an XML file which contains one or more 
results, preferably with a preference number from 0 to 100.
So using kio and qt::dom (or a more abstract layer on top of this) should do 
most of the work.

The advantages of meta-servers are (except that it's cool to have them):
- receiving up-to-date information, dependent on the version of every 
individual game
- dynamic restructuring of networks (e.g. if hosts go down)
- they're optional, not essential. This means if they're not available for 
some minutes, the normal connection method still applies
- a weird idea from Capzilla: Launching games from KNewsTicker, e.g. if a new 
server is announced on linuxgames.com, the RDF file could contain a query:// 
link :-)
- important issue: traffic distribution to not kill servers with 1000+ 
players (who knows, one day that number will be normal)

The server to query could be configured with a KCM. I could also imagine a 
"cache" but that's beyond of what I think now.

Oh.. the reason why I bring it up here: There'll be a meta server in GGZ and 
I'm doing both the server and the client (KDE) reference implementation, and 
as this is a very generic concept, I could imagine to have this functionality 
for all KDE network games. It's not much overhead, so in case you consider 
this functionality important it could be thrown into kdegames and: the 
wishlist is open now :-)

Most games will only need the URI-based concept. But maybe you know Freeciv's 
RSS/RDF files, this is a quite similar concept and allows to either list all 
known servers with certain features, or to randomly connect to the best of 
them all, so the XML concept would be needed here.

Josef

-- 
The MindX Open Source Project: Fighting proprietary games
GGZ now! - The GGZ Gaming Zone: http://ggz.sourceforge.net
ggz.morat.net | ggz.snafu.de | jzaun.com | mindx.sourceforge.net/europeone
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