[Kde-games-devel] Open Source Go server and software

[Josef Spillner (KDE)]

Em 3/2/2008, "Ian Wadham" <ianw2 at optusnet.com.au> escreveu:
>But by "Go server" I mean a club or meeting place for human Go
>players, including the ability to log on and watch games in progress
>or study past games, maybe even run tournaments, and certainly
>record rankings of members, etc. etc.

This is exactly why we introduce GGZ into kdegames. Because all of those
features are already present and don't need to be re-implemented for
every game again. Go in particular doesn't have a "game review"
implementation yet but we can work on that. It's just a question of
priorities - other people value Ruby bindings higher and then there's a
guy on IRC who wants a Shogi server (Japanese Chess). Helping hands are
certainly welcome! Hm, maybe I should just implement "game review"
this afternoon to make a screenshot I can point to.

The Go protocols (GMP and GTP) already support player registration and
the like. However, I wouldn't recommend using them, as all data is sent
without any encryption. This is why we decided to split the protocols
into two parts, game-specific and framework, and then let GGZ handle the
framework part. Existing Go software can easily be adapted. My GMP
knowledge is from around 2004, though.

>Apparently Go servers can
>also run a game in real-time, on-line ... or off-line (if you are
>time-poor or bandwidth-limited) submitting moves by an email-
>like method.  Well I'm waffling and have not studied the
>possibilities, but I just wanted to make the point.

E-Mail gaming is also something I'd never implement for specific games,
as the administration is very error-prone. Other games such as Chess and
Diplomacy can also be played by mail. I think it'd be nice to have a
generic mail-to-GGZ gateway some day, but until then for these kinds of
setups there's no way around an already existing game-specific setup
I'm afraid.