[Kde-games-devel] Re: GSoC Project: Multi-Player gaming in KDE games

[Daniele E. Domenichelli]

Hi Viranch,

On 03/01/2011 09:09 AM, Viranch Mehta wrote:
> I'm an undergraduate student from India and interested in doing the GSoC
> project "Multi-Player gaming in KDE games".


I see 2 possibilities:

1) Take just one game and implement multi-player just for that game,
using streamtubes if the game already implements some communication
protocol or using dbustubes to implement a new one.
For example it could be interesting to investigate if the XBoard
protocol can be used through telepathy streamtubes and modify Knights to
use it.
Implement a new protocol shouldn't be hard for a "simple" game, but
could be a hard task for a complicated game (see 2)
I don't know if such a project is good enough for GSoC, and if it is
useful for KDE, but it could be worth to try asking around if you have
some ideas.

2) Create an infrastructure for multi-player gaming.
This would be really cool, but in my opinion, this implementation is
something more than "Skill level: medium" and depends on the project
"Distributed Shared-State system based on DBus tubes for KDE apps".
I tried to implement some collaboration features in Cantor last GSoC but
that part of the project wasn't really successful because of the absence
of the D-Bus daemon. I see the same identical problems in implementing a
generic multi-player library (or even worse due to the higher
abstraction level).
I'd rather go for the "Distributed Shared-State system based on DBus
tubes for KDE apps" project and eventually, if you are really interested
in the multi-player part, use it in some game instead of in KWhiteboard.



> I have no experience with Telepathy. Could anyone guide me with
> a kick start? Also, where I can find the relevant codes?

A good place to start with telepathy is Telepathy Developer's Manual [1]
It is based on glib, but you can learn the basic concepts about Telepathy.
Other useful resources are Telepathy specifications [2] and
Telepathy-Qt4 doxygen generated documentation [3]

You can find some information about Telepathy in KDE and instructions to
set up everything here [4][5]

My advice, if you want to be accepted as a GSoC student is to start as
soon as possible studying telepathy, understanding the code, hacking,
submitting patches etc.
Also come and meet us on IRC, you can find us on #kde-telepathy on
freenode. For any question you can ask there or on the mailing list


Cheers,
 Daniele


[1]http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/doc/book/
[2]http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/spec/
[3]http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/doc/telepathy-qt4/
[4]http://community.kde.org/Real-Time_Communication_and_Collaboration
[5]http://community.kde.org/Real-Time_Communication_and_Collaboration/Getting_Set_Up