Pascal Bourque wrote:
Hello,
I am planning the architecture of a multi-player game that will be
based on XMPP.
In the game, there is a concept of game rooms which will be
represented by MUC chat rooms. Each room will be joined by an arbiter
bot who will manage the game being held in that room. XMPP messages
exchanged in a room will be game commands never seen by the end-users,
so it will effectively be a conversation between the game clients and
the arbiter bot.
There will be an external component responsible for managing the game
rooms. It will monitor the number of players currently logged into the
XMPP server and create or delete game (MUC) rooms as needed.
On the game UI side, we have a "lobby" where players can see which
rooms are currently available, as well as the count of players in each
room and the state of the room (waiting for more players, game in
progress, etc). In the lobby, we want the UI to refresh in real-time
so that it always shows the current stats of each game room. If game
rooms are created, they should appear immediately in the lobby. As
other players join a room, the player count for that room should be
updated in the UI.
When the lobby is initially displayed, I can do a disco IQ to the MUC
service to retrieve the list of game rooms and their attributes, but
that info is static. If 2 more rooms appear 3 seconds after the
initial disco, they won't appear in the lobby. I could do polling by
issuing a disco IQ every few seconds, but that wouldn't quite fit in
the XMPP spirit, would it? :)
So in other words, I need to monitor the state of the MUC rooms
(number of rooms as well as each room's attributes) in a PubSub-like
manner.
There are other situations where this would be useful. Basically for any
service which is dynamic, it would be useful to have this ability
I just had a little chat with Peter Saint-Andre about this, and he
mentionned that there had recently been some discussion about defining
a "disco#meta" protocol to replace the use of service discovery
extensions (XEP-0128) for things like this. He said that this was
something that would/could be discussed at the XMPP summit next week.
I actually think a feature listed in the when you disco#info the service
would list a pubsub type feature which you would then subscribe too.
Tory Patnoe
