The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

So, I'm nowhere near a programer.  I know nothing about C++.  I am barely competent on Photoshop, and I know very little about server capacity and whatnot so this question may seem silly... but:

Currently, in order to net melee, you have to give your IP address to another player who types it into their game and then you connect and play together, right?

Is it an expense matter or something different which keeps us from having a site that we can all link into in order to find people to play against and which hosts the games for us -- kind of like a Gamespy or the thing they have for Diablo?

Is this a prospect that is in the works?  Or will the "search for people on the chat client and then give them your IP address in order to play" thing be a forever thing for net melee for UQM?

Yes. Meep-eep can probably fill in the details on the status of this, but AFAIK it's in the early design stage while we figure out how to do it properly. The currently favoured approach seems to be to set up a server that keeps track of available hosts in the form of "challenges" and add to UQM the necessary interface code to get this list of challenges, talk to the other player and start a game.

There are still many things in UQM that need work, and while I would like a lobby server, it's not what I'm working on right now. As making a lobby server requires little knowledge about the workings of the rest of the game, and would not even have to be done in the same programming language, I'm hoping someone else would step up to take this off my plate. So far, two people have volunteered, and unvolunteered again.

Well, here's the perfect opportunity for someone to volunteer again.

Any takers?

Anyone?

*crickets chirp*

Maybe that's a wrong topic to ask, but it's related to multiplayer games, and I don't want to create one more thread...
If a permanent dedicated server is established, will there be any multiplayer modes for more than two players? For instance, "sliding melee" for n amount of players, with structure of 1 vs 2, winner of 1/2 vs 3, ... , n-1 vs n, n vs 1 and so on until there's only one.

Maybe - not sure quite what you mean by sliding melee. I'm all for an automated league/tournament structure in any new netmelee server/lobby - perhaps with ratings and official/non-official games (as per Yahoo Games). Currently i'm running leagues and Knockout tournaments manually and intend to do so for the foresee able future. I see no reason why a computer can't do what i'm doing. Of course it takes time and effort of someone that isn't me, as I'm not a programmer either.

"Sliding melee" (maybe the term is confusing) should work like that:
4 players register. The schedule is like that:
P2 vs. P1
P3 vs. previous winner
P4 vs. previous winner
P1 (or P2, if P1 won three previous battles) vs. previous winner
And so on.