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Author
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Topic: Net Play - Lobby (Read 15165 times)
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Amiga_Nut
*Many bubbles*
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Gender: 
Posts: 208
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Well, first, I really appreciate all the responses to this thread. I don’t know what solution is best. I agree with the statement that “temporary solutions often become permanent ones” I know there is someone out there ready and able to code a solution. I thank Novus and Meep-eep for their effort in responding this thread. All I can do is offer money or CGI to the person or who makes my dreams of escorting several unsuspecting SC2 players to their deaths, a reality. Best of luck to you all,
Metallic Medium CGI
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Stalks-Death
Zebranky food
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Posts: 11
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I'm very interseted in playing against other people...but the channel is always empty when i get in there.
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Stalks-Death
Zebranky food
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Posts: 11
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That must be it. I'll try again this evening. Thanks for the info.
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Death 999
Global Moderator
Enlightened
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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I don't see a 'freenode' network in the list. I see 'freeworld' and 'freedomchat'... If I pick it as a standalone server is that a problem?
edited to add: apparently, no.
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« Last Edit: January 12, 2007, 11:07:33 pm by Death 999 »
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Cedric6014
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Posts: 701
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Hi UQM team. I would love to know what the latest is with the netplay lobby development (if any). Is this something you guys are doing right now? Is it something that can accommodate contributions from others before its completed?
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Novus
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Fot or not?
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As it is something which is only marginally connected with the game source, my hope is that someone else steps up to work on this, while I work on other things that netplay needs.
I suppose I could take a shot at it if we can agree on a feature set and division of labour (i.e. where does my part end?). We've gone over the basic idea already, but here's my take on how to do it:
Each player connects to the server on entering the lobby (from the SuperMelee menu) and gets a list of available challenges on the server (IP address, player/fleet name, fleet composition). A connected player can:- Add (or, if he already has one, remove it) a challenge (which all the other players are told about).
- Respond to a challenge, in which case the other player is contacted directly and asked to confirm; if affirmative, both players are removed from the lobby and returned to the SuperMelee menu connected to each other, as in the existing system.
- Exit the lobby (drop the connection, removing the challenge if any).
The above is pretty much the bare minimum lobby functionality. The obvious next step to me is to add a public chat to the lobby and a private chat between connected players, allowing for more detailed discussion of fleet setups. At a minimum, this would require the option to write single lines of plain text and send them in between the messages sent to/from the lobby or other player.
As far as connection setup goes, it should be possible to estimate a good value for netdelay from round-trip time between the players in the game (this could then be tweaked at connection confirmation time).
I haven't worked out the protocol in detail yet, but I'd probably do it as newline-separated textual commands over TCP; easy to implement, test and debug. I think I'd do the server in Java, where insufficient validity checks on net traffic are more likely to get the offender hung up on than result in code injection.
Am I making any sense here? 
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Cedric6014
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I have a a bunch of design ideas kicking around but because I have 0.01 computer knowledge I don't know whether they're plausible, improbable, or just laughable.
I will take a chance and float some in the anticipation that I get laughed out of UQMville
The basics
- A prominent link from the PoNaF home page
- A lobby that works off the same log-in details as the UQM forum. This way people retain the same identity in both the lobby and the forum(s). Perhaps if you're already logged in to UQM forum you don't need to log-in to the melee lobby.
- Once you've entered the Netplay lobby you're confronted with a list of 'arenas' where battle can take place. You know how battle takes place around a planet? Same principle here! The arenas would be labeled Pollux II, Jupiter, Beta Brahe IA etc. Ideally the actual planet graphic could be used as the planet around which battle takes place. That would be neat!
- Ability to join arenas to watch a melee - with no limit to how many people can view. Imagine everyone watching the final of a league game - cool!
- Maybe even the ability to comment during game play in the arena. Full crowd atmosphere.
Tournament capability (my baby)
- Okay, this might be far fetched: I would like this lobby to magically administer tournaments and record results and statistics
- Automatic registration of league entrants and updates of league results and tables
- Ratings system for players
- And other such exciting features
The underlying mechanics, which have been discussed on this thread are not something I really understand at all.
My aim is to persuade my brother to have a crack at this, if no-one else is. Clearly I need to be made aware of the varying degrees of impossibility for the above!
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Novus
Enlightened
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Posts: 1938
Fot or not?
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The basics- A lobby that works off the same log-in details as the UQM forum. This way people retain the same identity in both the lobby and the forum(s). Perhaps if you're already logged in to UQM forum you don't need to log-in to the melee lobby.
My initial design is purely intended to aid in setting up games, not keep track of any statistics or so. However, some form of authentication would be necessary if any meaningful tracking of player performance is to be added. As the netplay server would probably run on the same machine as the forum, using the same user database would save the trouble of keeping track of separate user accounts (and allow us to use the forum's features for much of the password administration).
- Once you've entered the Netplay lobby you're confronted with a list of 'arenas' where battle can take place. You know how battle takes place around a planet? Same principle here! The arenas would be labeled Pollux II, Jupiter, Beta Brahe IA etc. Ideally the actual planet graphic could be used as the planet around which battle takes place. That would be neat!
Wild idea: use the starmap to select a planet when creating a new arena.
- Ability to join arenas to watch a melee - with no limit to how many people can view. Imagine everyone watching the final of a league game - cool!
One way to approach this is to extend the lobby system to include games in progress to which one can connect as an observer (some sort of peer-to-peer chaining of observers would probably be nice for major events; even though the amount of data is small, thousands of small packets per second can still clog up your link pretty bad, and latency is not really an issue for an observer).
- Maybe even the ability to comment during game play in the arena. Full crowd atmosphere.
 !")) mute.
Tournament capability (my baby)- Okay, this might be far fetched: I would like this lobby to magically administer tournaments and record results and statistics
- Automatic registration of league entrants and updates of league results and tables
- Ratings system for players
- And other such exciting features
If the server keeps track of players, keeping track of game results (and even replays!) would be relatively easy, as would organising tournaments. A tournament or league would merely be an arena with special rules on who plays who next and a few lines of extra code to handle scoring.
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meep-eep
Forum Admin
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I've already said a lot about this earlier in this thread, but here are a few more comments:
I agree with a TCP text-based protocol; easy to implement, debug, and maintain. I already had the start of a protocol written down; perhaps you're interested in seeing it.
As for the "where does my part end?", for a start, the lobby could be a separate program which starts UQM. Then you wouldn't have to touch the UQM code at all (if you want), and we'll add a few command-like options to start the game in Netplay mode. And as I mentioned before, that "separate program" could just be something which communicates between the game and a web server, so that the entire lobby could be done in the browser. (It doesn't have to work like this; this is just one relatively easy way).
As for Java, it would not have been my first choice, but if you're making the lobby, it will be your choice. I'm sure we can install java on uqm.stack.nl.
Using the forum login for authentication is an interesting idea, which I hadn't considered before. But in Open Source spirit, it should be possible for anyone to run a server, and then this method would suddenly be a lot less interesting.
As for rooms; star/planet names might be a nice default for room names, but it would be better to make them user-definable. If you have a contest, a room named "Kohr-Ah Cup" beats "Beta Copernicus IV".
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“When Juffo-Wup is complete
when at last there is no Void, no Non
when the Creators return
then we can finally rest.”
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Valaggar
Guest
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...And then you end up with the game that Spathi captain are playing...
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Pages: 1 [2] 3 4
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