[Kde-games-devel] Network protocol

[Martin Heni]

> KGame has some network support. It appeared rather generic but didn't
> support scopes for properties (hiding certain properties from other
> players) so it's usefulness might be limited if you have a game where this
> is required.

KGame offers network support on two levels.

The first layer is quite programmers friendly as it does a lot of things 
automatically like transmitting variables. However, it has the disadvantage 
as Rob pointed out that it is _not_ safe against cheating. 

But I think there are still two things in favor of using it: 
1. It is relatively easy to use. And as network support is not so
easy to write it might be preferable having this support than no
support at all. 
2. Also there are games where even with knowing the state of the game
you cannot cheat (chess,...). With other game aplications it might me
possible to cheat but not really worth it. If someone really needs to
cheat the network games of KBattlefield he is quite sad anyway.

The second layer in the KGame library (KGameNetwork) allows the programmer to 
just exchange network messages via the framework. Doing so,
the programmer can implement all the saftey he wants by either not
exchanging the data which should not be visible or encrypting it.

The KDoc manual, an extensive description and a demo program can be 
found on
http://www.heni-online.de/libkdegames/index.html


Btw. if anybody wants to extend the KGame library to cheat free data exchange 
or GGZ support he is _most_ welcome to do so. I think it would be quite 
helpful having a decent and established native network game support in KDE 
(especially when looking to the future of KDE) and I admit that the current 
library is only the first step in this direction (although I think it has a 
lot of underestimated potential like Burkhards network clients).