Re: Online games

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

On Fri, 10 Mar 2000, Pierre Phaneuf wrote:

>Also, a more flexible generic server might support attaching some
>arbitrary data to the server entry, that the specific game would
>interpret.

A generic server does not care what kind of game it is 'running', it just
reads data from connected clients and forward it to the proper recipients.
The data should not be interpreted in any way, just realyed. The server
should only manage the clients that connect/leave, and provide means of
sending data. Ideally all client games would use a common API which would
define an easy and stable interface for communicating with the server.

Ideally the server could handle different types of services at the same
time, and even different instances of the same service (game). The server
could thus host 10 different DeathMatches in Q3, and 50 separate games of
chess without interferece.

>But even with all those ideas for a generic meta-server, all this thing
>has "generic" is the code. The user interface would still be specific to
>each games, and I think it should stay that way. The user chooses a game
>on his machine, *then* chooses a server, not the two at the same time.

Of course. A specific game probably has some server where there usually is
some activity, while other servers never 'carry' a certain game. A nice
feature would of course be if a server could tell the client somehow of
other servers that usually run a certain game, so that the player gets the
server where opponents can be found.

Well, this is of course all hypothetical, but it would be nice to have
such a system. :-)

---------------------+------------------------------------------------------
 Jan 'Chakie' Ekholm |    CS at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
    Linux Inside     | I'm the blue screen of death, no-one hears you scream


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