[Kde-games-devel] Online Granatier, common real time online gaming libs?

[Daniele E. Domenichelli]

Hello, and sorry for the late reply but I just saw this thread...


On 03/06/13 14:31, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> Le Saturday 01 June 2013 00:38:07 Nathan Sala a écrit :
>> Aurélien gave a nice idea to link create/search/join features with instant
>> messaging accounts.
>> I think it was about Telepathy?
> 
> Yes, if I am not mistaken, Telepathy Tubes is used in Naval Battle to share a 
> game over the Internet. I think this should be a second step though, I would 
> suggest getting a LAN game to run reliably as a first step.



I'm one of the two "players" of kbattleship via telepathy tubes[1] (the
winner). David (the loser) is in cc. Accidentally we are also KDE
Telepathy developers ;)
Getting KBattleship working was extremely easy. Since the protocol
already existed, we just had to use telepathy as an additional network
layer (and that's very easy to do using stream-tubes). The reason why we
didn't merge it in kbattleship is because we don't have a stable KTp
library yet.


I just wanted to say that if you choose to use telepathy, you have our
full support on the telepathy side, just come and talk to us on IRC
(#kde-telepathy on freenode), or on the kde-telepathy mailing list.

With telepathy you can forget about NAT, IP, authentication, encryption,
as they are all handled by the network layer.
Also you can forget about communication between players during the game,
as it can be handled using the text, voice, and video chat

Using stream-tubes you just get a normal socket where you can
read/write. All you have to do is to care about the protocol that the
client and the server will run.

Another option is to use dbus-tubes that give you a DBus peer to peer
connection, and you can use signals and slots on it, like on a normal
dbus connection (there are a few limitations due to fact that is a peer
to peer connection, and not a connection to a dbus daemon, i.e. you
cannot have a service name).


For completeness, I must admit that there might be bugs, and that the
library is not stable, but on the other hand you can help us requesting
the methods that you need and giving us a very valuable feedback.



> It is OK if people have to scream their IP address over the room, you can add 
> game discovering over Telepathy or LAN or over the Internet later :)


Unfortunately IIRC the connection manager that handles the LAN
connection does not support tubes yet, but you can do it over the
internet using XMPP as backend.



Cheers,
 Daniele



[1]http://www.sharpley.org.uk/blog/telepathy-tubes-in-kbattleship