GSoC: KDE Games powered by Telepathy

[Daniele E. Domenichelli]

On 20/02/12 22:11, Stefan Majewsky wrote:
> Hi,
>
> on the GSoC ideas page, under "Telepathy", I saw a project to use
> KDE-Telepathy to set up a multiplayer game in kdegames. It has a
> "NOTE: We need to discuss this with KDE Games."
>
> As the de-facto libkdegames maintainer, I'd like to inform you that I
> very much welcome this idea. I just removed the old KGGZ framework
> from libkdegames, because it relies on a server infrastructure that
> probably does not even work anymore, and I'd like to have a working
> multiplayer solution very much.
>
> The best target for a KDE-Telepathy student would probably be KSirk,
> because it already uses Jabber to set up a connection. It would be
> great to port this in order to remove the giant heap of code that's
> used for the Jabber connection.
>
> Because of real-life commitments, I will very likely not be available
> as a mentor, but I volunteer for co-mentoring on this project from the
> kdegames side of things, if desired.
>
> Greetings
> Stefan

Hi Stefan,

I'm really glad you like the idea, I've been planning to write on the 
kde-games mailing list about this, but I didn't have time to do it.
I had a look at KSirk code long time ago (actually 2 years ago when I 
was trying to write a project for GSoC when I was a student) and I think 
that porting it to use telepathy shouldn't be hard to do, because using 
telepathy you have "Tubes" that are a very easy mechanism for connecting 
applications: Streamtubes give you a QSocket that you can use exactly 
like a normal socket and DBusTubes give you a peer-to-peer 
QDBusConnection that is slightly different from a connection to DBus 
server, but can be used almost in the same way.

If I remember correctly, in KSirc you already have a protocol that you 
use over TCP/IP or over Jabber, therefore a streamtube is probably the 
best option. You just need some code to choose the contact and connect 
and then you just need to use the QSocket that is created by the 
streamtube. The same is probably valid for Kbattleship (but I didn't 
check the source code)

This makes, in my opinion, the project a little too short, that's why I 
was suggesting to add some more stuff to the project, like implementing 
multiplayer in some game that doesn't have it yet, or some kind of 
library to measure latency, or something else.
What were the features offered by the KGGZ framework? we could use that 
as a model for writing the library...
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it is better to have a bigger project that 
we realize during the implementation that it cannot be finished, rather 
than a project that is finished after one month.

What do you think?

Cheers,
  Daniele

P.S. Your help in co-mentoring this project is very welcome!
P.P.S. I'm CC'ing the kde-telepathy mailing list, as there might be 
someone else interested in the discussion