[Kde-games-devel] Better networking support

[Josef Spillner]

Hi,

I'm in the progress of adding a couple of additional online playing
features. Parts of it are already committed (in libkdegames), some
other parts not yet (in KSquares); you might find the patch at
http://www.ggzgamingzone.org/~josef/ksquares+ggz.diff if you're
interested.

Most interesting features:
- KHighscore/KScoreDialog integration with new GGZ rankings transmission
  messages (currently highscores only, but we should also integrate
  ratings etc. in there)
- auto-generated binary protocol for 'Dots' is used in KSquares -
  efficient and (nearly) maintenance-free at the same time
- pre-game dialogue in KSquares adapts automatically to player and bot
  changes on the server, which looks pretty cool

I hope to get KSquares support ready in the next days. Afterwards
some of those features may be propagated to KBattleship and KReversi.

An open task is still the integration of the libkdegames chat system
with GGZ. Any volunteer?

A lot of work has also been invested on the server side. Things like
canonicalised usernames are not really visible, but still require a lot of
work with all the necessary Unicode infrastructure. The benefit is that
the player complaints about similar names will be reduced; you might know
this from i18n'd domain names where similar characters are treated like
one and the same (e.g. "ß" and "ss"). Now when a player registers with
one of them, all similarly written alternative names are automatically
blocked.
Just to give some info on what's going on :-)

Josef