[Kde-games-devel] KsirK and Jabber

[Kleag]

Hello,

On Tuesday 16 September 2008 16:03:50 Richard Hartmann wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 22:04, Kleag <kleag at free.fr> wrote:
> > - no proxy/firewall change: as soon as you have a working Jabber, you can
> > have games running on your machine or connect to any other running game
> > without changing your network configuration ;
>
> Afaik, KDE games should use a central server provided by KDE, no? In that
> case, the firewall/NAT will not pose more or less of a barrier for plain
> TCP/IP than for
> Jabber.
Personally, I dislike centralized solutions. Even if they present advantages, 
it seems to me to go against my view of the freedom spirit of free software. 
Well, don't take that too seriously, it's not so important but it express a 
part of why I want to continue this way.
Concerning the "should use a central server...". The existence of the central 
kde games server serving games that even can be interoperable with Gnome (?) 
is a Great Thing (TM) but really it should not forbid experimentations toward 
other ways of doing. We are in the free software world where many great things 
come from initial little experiments. And, as said elsewhere, "who code 
decide" :-)

>
> > - chatroom infrastructure : you inherit from the Jabber chatrooms. It is
> > really easy to create a chatroom and it is also easy to connect to other
> > chatrooms to find running games. Also, you can use the very same rosom to
> > discuss with other human players about the future games.
>
> You need two rooms for each game. One for talking and one for data
> exchange. Otherwise, you would need to filter out certain messages and use
> them for game data exchange.
No, no (and you can already try it, it is available). Because I kept my 
original design where one of the clients become the server of a running game 
and all the others send personal messages to its full id in the room, thus 
avoiding displays in the room.
>
> > - P2P and standardized naming: as soon as you are connected to the Jabber
> > network, you can connect to any chatroom you know (and are authorized to
> > reach). In the future, ksirk rooms and games should also be able to tell
> > their presence to the rest of the world, reducing the need to know a
> > precise chatroom name.
>
> I thought the announcement should be handled by a central KDE server?
> At least, this idea went over this list quite some time back.
Well, as said before, centralization is not a must have in my mind, but there 
is also the possibility to have a central "official" kde games jabber room...

>
>
> Another thing I see as a potential problem is that it would be very easy
> for kiddies to disrupt games other people play. Fire up your Jabber client
> and spam everyone. The entry barrier is a lot lower than with a seperate
> protocol.
A generic protocol cannot be a bad thing. It's just a language and it's 
extensible if necessary to add all what is necessary to provide needed 
security.

>
> Also, this setup does not allow for a central data source. If the 'host'
> quits, the whole game will stop (unless you have fall-over provisions).
It's conceived like that: if one of the clients quit, then the server propose 
to save the game that can be restarted later. Only if the central player crash 
the game is lost.

> Without a central, neutral component, cheating is very easy. I can just
> modify my local client to have two extra buttons: 'throw sixes in attack'
> and 'trump the attack for defense throw'.
Well, I wrote in a previous mail that fighting against cheating is not my 
current priority. Trust, you know :-) And in fact, you have just to trust the 
central/server peer: it's him who takes all the decisions. If you trust him, 
you trust the game. If we want more distributed trust, I'm sure that there is 
solutions like the one suggested by other posters in this thread or the 
cryptographic systems used in distributed P2P databases.

Gaël
>
>
> Richard
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-- 
KsirK - a world domination strategy game 
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Games/Tactic_and_Strategy/KsirK

KGraphViewer - a GraphViz dot graphs viewer
http://extragear.kde.org/apps/kgraphviewer