#9 Need a Bots'n'Scouts gaming "community"
We need a central location for players to meet and
arrange live online games. This could take a couple of
different forms:
1) A standard web forum. This would probably be fairly
easy to add to the existing Bots'n'Scouts website, or we
could look around and hijack another existing game
forum for our own.
This is the easiest to implement, as there are so many
free forums out there, but you'd have a million
messages like "starting one in 10 minutes" for games
that really finished a week ago. I guess it wouldn't be so
bad if people came back to edit their message titles
after games had started.
2) A custom game-queue forum. This would be a simple
variation on a discussion forum, with a custom "status"
field listed for each game. The starter of a game could
easily list the game and set the status to "OPEN". As
the game starts, he would manually change it
to "RUNNING" and then switch it to "FINISHED" when
the game was over.
You could choose to filter out FINISHED games and
just show OPEN and RUNNING.
Each user would still have to run the program
themselves, and type in the IP address or server name
to connect to the game. In this variation the forum
doesn't really require any connection to the games
themselves, like the following would:
3) COOLEST (and hardest) OPTION: Full Bots'n'Scouts
Game server.
A machine that actually operates as the game server,
and has an associated game list with status as listed
above. You could log onto the web page, browse for an
open game that looks interesting, click the game, and
choose JOIN. It would launch the game itself and
automatically connect to the server, starting the game
when you had the correct number of players.
I guess there are some variations in between, like:
2.5) Game-queue forum with auto-launch.
When someone creates a game, they enter their own
server information. (IP address). When a user wants to
join that game, the web page can use the server
information, and run the correct command-line
parameter to for the client to connect to this game.
or
3.5) An in-game server list (as opposed to a web page).
When you start a server game, you are given the option
for "public" or "private". When someone else wants to
join an existing game, they'll just click "browse for
game", and be given a list of all currently open games.
I'm not sure if this last one is easier or harder than the
web-based options. Probably easier, you'd just have a
central server listed in the config file that will keep a
simple list of all currently open games, removing them
from the list when games fill up and start.
This would take the game from an A- to an A+++ !!
Great job so far, guys.
Brad
bradcorbin@yahoo.com
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We are going for the non-web-based variant. Maybe there will
be a web page telling what is going on at the meta server in
addition.
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By the way:
there is a forum at
http://foren.spline.de/
(down at the bottom) that really needs some posts ;-)