Andrew Plotkin wrote: > On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, Michal 'vorner' Vaner wrote: > >> Hello, >> >> On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 12:32:49PM -0500, Andrew Plotkin wrote: >>> >>> Hi -- I'm one of the Volity developers. I missed this discussion >>> yesterday, but I can comment on how Volity got the way it is. >> >> Do I get Volity right that just everything happens on the server and you >> can not have games without server support? It is a bit glitch for things >> like tic-tac-toe or battleship, IMHO. > > I think the answer to your question is "yes, everything happens on the > server". Except that's confusing, because I'm not talking about a > *Jabber* server. Every game requires a Volity game server, which is a > Jabber client (bot). > > If that's what you meant too, then good. :) > > As everyone has said, cheating is a problem -- both passive cheating > (seeing private information) and active (making illegal moves). Having > a game server makes the problems go away. And it's much easier to > build a uniform system than to say "ok, these games don't need a > server, those games need one, and these others don't *need* one but > it'll save us a lot of anticheating design..." The fact that > tic-tac-toe can be done more simply isn't a compelling argument; > tic-tac-toe doesn't draw in many real players. > > Also, the game server winds up handling a lot of infrastructure work > (noticing new players, distributing game status to them, tracking > players across client disconnects). >
When we had this discussion in the past in the JIG, this was exactly what I was alluding to. When I wrote a chess server for a friend (not xmpp based though), the problems we faced included rule enforcements (we wanted to support a bunch of chess variants including 2+ player ones), enforcing rules & how to prevent rule violation, how to manage user info (elo rating, stats, etc), 'seeking'/processing invites for game requests, how to allow observe & chat with other observers(whisper)/also to players(kibitz), tournaments, etc. In the context of xmpp, a lot of this is already present in the defined rfc/xep's itself (read only pubsub nodes for stats, muc's for multicasting info : seeks, kibitz/whisper, etc) and if I was to do it today, I might seriously look at xmpp. All this for chess - different games have differing set of requirements and any infrastructure xep should be flexible enough to allow any game (or the targeted class of game types) to be supported. A first person shooter multiplayer game like Counterstrike source will have differing requirements from multiplayer scrabble or chess or bomberman. Regards, Mridul > --Z >
