Quote:> ctrlsoft is of the opinion:
>> There are quite some good real time strategy games available for
>> linux. I haven't seen any for unix yet, apart from freecraft. Are
>> there more you could point me to? Searching at freshmeat didn't
>> help a lot.
> I presume you're thinking in the Ultima Online genre, or perhaps more of an
> online game of Risk?
>> I was wondering whether developing a RFC for a flexible network
>> protocol for real time strategy games would be what the community
>> needs(jabber is another good example of such a project: open
>> protocol, variety of clients on a variety of platforms,
>> extendable).
> Open protocols are good, and a stable, multi-platform implementation
> of the standard is even better. The difficulty is that the hard
> part of games is the gameplay, and working out ways of making the UI
> reflect the gameplay in a sane fashion. The performance aspect,
> too, tends to crowd things out.
> Basically, unfortunately I don't think that a standardised network
> protocol is going to bring on a sudden flood of open source
> real-time strategy games, because it's the gameplay and UI that's
> difficult, not the protocol.
> Feel free to blow me out of the water, though, since this isn't my
> speciality.
... And it sort of begs the question of whether or not there's
anything inherent in _GAME_ playing that dictates having a
specifically GAME-oriented RPC system.
There are perfectly good RPC systems out there that might be used to
support game control.
- CORBA probably has the downside of not always penetrating firewalls;
- SOAP pushes XML across HTTP, which has the upside of being "firewall-
compliant," but the downside of being pretty heavyweight in terms of
network bandwidth usage and of parsing;
- Isect <http://pweb.netcom.com/~tgagne/index.html> is a portable
messaging middleware package that could be interesting;
- There are a number of implementations of JMS (Java Messaging
Service) that could be useful for this;
- MidWay <http://www.mid-way.org/>
- Distributed Objects (schemes patterned after NeXT DO)
- Casbah LDO
These are the sorts of things worth evaluating. Various of them
involve quasi-formalized standards, but none have the word "game" in
them, so might all be unacceptable to someone who wants to make up a
protocol called GROPE (Game Requests Object Programming Environment).
--
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/corba.html
"I have never seen anything fill up a vacuum so fast and still suck."
-- Rob Pike on X
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