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

[Mathias Kraus]

Am Mittwoch, 29. Mai 2013, 21:56:40 schrieb Nathan Sala:
> Hello there gamers,

Hi

> We had a really great time playing Granatier today on the KDE stand for the
> OpenSource solutions forum in Paris.
> People also enjoyed watching us ;)

Nice to hear :)

> It came an idea which is to implement the online mode.

I always wanted Granatier to be an online game, but I didn't find time to do it.
Last year, I think, I saw a blog post from the telepathy guys. They had a proof of concept online version of battleship, but I don't know what happened with that.
At that time it sounded reasonable to use telepathy to connect the player with each other. With telepathy we wouldn't need to care about such things like NAT and so on.

> As far as I know, there is no example of real time online gaming in kde
> games?
> 
> I see a common part which would be valid for any game:
> - A client/server model with their specific interfaces.
> - Network layer
>   - A common messages header.
>   - A TCP/UDP messages matching.
>   - A messages synchronization based on sequence numbers.
> - A later next step: textual description of the network messages and
> automatic structs and classes generation at compile time.

It look like you have some experience with online gaming. It would be great if you could help with a common library.

> And then Granatier as a POC:
> - Modification of the game engine to fully support the client/server model
> with 2 types of clients: local and remote.
> - Some UI work about creating/joining games and so on.

I already did some proof of concept work in a scratch repo to try to separate the game engine from the visual representation, but didn't get too far.
It's a big task, the codebase is about 8000 lines of code, but it is doable if there are several people working on it.

Regards,
Hias

> This is just a first thought, so any comment is greatly welcome
> 
> Regards,
> Nathan