[Kde-games-devel] Game servers

[Josef Spillner]

Hi,

Am Dienstag, 10. April 2007 15:48 schrieb Dmitry Suzdalev:
> Hi, Josef!
>
> Speaking of GGZ and KReversi...
> What steps do we need to take to get this tandem working? :-)
> In particular, what I - as a programmer - need to read/know/learn?

What is probably most interesting for you is how to differentiate between 
network play and non-network play in a way that doesn't affect the GUI 
negatively. We already discussed a bit whether menu items should be greyed 
out (disabled) or be hidden in cases of not being applicable.
Then there's also the chance of breaking network connections, which must be 
tested carefully - i.e. the game shouldn't simply abort, but do something 
meaningful.

In terms of responsiveness, it is always wise to already start animations 
before the server confirms a move. If local move validation is possible, it 
should be used, but the server should be able to override it.

That's about it from what I can think of. There's still a lot of GUI work to 
do for GGZ integration. From what I understand, the chat dialogue in 
libkdegames is written in a way that it can be used on other chat systems. 
Since in GGZ there's room chat and table chat, the latter one would use the 
dialog for in-game chat. I haven't had the time to look into it yet.

> I've seen you mailed some GGZ-related document(s) to this list
> (tutorial? reference? APIdocs?), but unfortunately due to some bug in
> KMail they were deleted from my mailbox soon after they were
> received... And it'll take some time to find them in the public
> archives.. Perhaps you can mail me those documents or point to (GGZ)
> webpage where they are stored (if any)?

Evil KMail. The documents were tutorials, and I wish we had good list 
archives. I'm going to upload them somewhere and ping you about the location.

> Also I've seen you modified some of kreversi classes to put in GGZ
> support, but from what I've seen I guess that was just a beginning?
> ;-)

Yes, it works up to the handshake, but then sending the moves doesn't reuse 
the code which shuffles all chips, and end-of-game isn't handled at all. I'm 
sure that it could be solved with 1-2 hours of hacking but I haven't found 
the time yet. Or maybe someone should just force me to do it - at least I'm 
upgrading the SVN checkout at the moment and then try to get into it again :)

Josef