Re: [M-dev]Initial rudimentary metaserver support

[Alan W. <de...@gm...>]

Ok, for about a week now, since I've downloaded the code, I've been
working on adding metaserver support. I've gotten nearly everything 
implemented, a nice chat display, players display, rooms dialog,
etc...  A nearly complete metaserver client. I'm working on Windows,
so of course only the SDL implementation is written. I have only the
metaserver games packets to deal with before I was going to work on
polishing it up and releasing the code.

With this news of your nearly working code, I think this would be a
good time to announce what I have and work on merging our code if
needed to complete the transformation. I've entered a live metaserver
(playmyth.net) with it this morning.
http://www.darooster.net/pictures/alephonelives.jpg

Let me know what we should do to finish this before I lose interest  :)

Alan




On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 02:37:28 -0500, Woody Zenfell III
<woo...@ve...> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As many of you know, I've had A1 integration with bungie.net-style
> metaservers brewing for a while.  The recent attention to the project
> (10th anniversary, free content, etc.) and attempts to splinter the
> community encouraged me to make some more progress on it.
> 
> I have put together some very rudimentary metaserver support.  It
> currently only uses "guest" accounts on mariusnet (www.mariusnet.com),
> and there are many, many features and niceties not implemented
> "end-to-end" yet.  But it's a start, and I wanted to get it into the
> living codebase as soon as possible, and continue to refine it from
> there.
> 
> So far, metaserver client functionality is only exposed through the SDL
> UI (because it's easier to develop for, and because it's the only
> cross-platform solution).  I expect Carbon support will be added at
> some point as well.  Currently, as noted, support is fairly rough and
> minimal:
> 
>     * The "Join" box now has an extra button, "Join by Metaserver".
> This launches a new dialog box that connects to mariusnet, enters the
> "Vimy Ridge" room, and shows the players (A1 or not!) and A1 games in
> that room, along with a chat window.  You can't see any information
> about a player besides his name.  You can't see any information about a
> game besides its name (which is currently set to the name of the
> gathering player plus "'s Game").  Chat works but is not terribly
> pleasant.  All chat messages are the same color, and it can be hard to
> tell where one message ends and the next starts.  Clicking "Cancel"
> disconnects and takes you back to the main menu.  Clicking on a
> player's name does nothing.  Clicking on a game attempts to join that
> game, as if you had entered its IP address for "Join by IP".
> 
>     * The "Setup Network Game" box now has an extra toggle, "Advertise
> Game on Metaserver".  You won't be able to tell it, but this invisibly
> connects to mariusnet, enters the "Vimy Ridge" room, and creates a game
> that joining A1 players should be able to see.  You'll remain connected
> to that room, with that game advertised, until you cancel gathering or
> start the game.  In either of those cases, you'll summarily disconnect
> from mariusnet, taking away your game with you.  Note:
> 
>        * Advertising your game on the metaserver doesn't prevent people
> from joining your game by IP or "by LAN".
> 
>        * Advertising your game on the metaserver doesn't require that
> you configure port forwarding on your router/NAT device/etc., but
> gathering any game (advertised or not) still does!  This could be
> somewhat confusing/misleading for newbies.
> 
> A couple practical notes that follow from the above:
> 
>     * We're guests at mariusnet; it's an established service with a
> small group of regular Myth players.  If they wander in and get
> curious, be friendly.  May as well start off on the right foot.  :)  Of
> course, they may rapidly learn to congregate in a different room.
> 
>     * When Joining by Metaserver, note that if you see games there, the
> gathering players won't be able to hear anything you say to them, etc.
> because they're just seeing the ordinary "Gather Network Game" box on
> their screen.
> 
>     * People won't appear in the room while they're actually playing a
> game, nor will the game appear.  So if you're sniffing around for
> games, you may want to hang around in there for a bit and see whether
> people pop in between games.  Actually in the meantime, you probably
> want to continue using whatever method you've been using (AIM chat
> room, etc.) to find other players; I don't think this is mature enough
> yet to substitute.
> 
> Don't update documentation, etc. to match the above, because frankly
> this user experience kind of sucks, and I hope it will rapidly evolve
> into something more pleasant, making most of the above obsolete.  But
> this is the minimum change I could devise that actually provides most
> of the fundamental value of the metaserver.
> 
> People building the SDL project will need to update project files to
> add the files in Network/Metaserver.  People building the Carbon
> project will eventually need to do something like that, but I don't
> think they'll be affected yet.
> 
> Please let me know how things go if you experiment with this.  In the
> meantime I'll keep improving and refining both the code and the user
> experience.  This is also a bit of an experiment: using A1's CVS
> repository for somewhat rough code still under development (but
> believed not to break anything), rather than only for really polished,
> well-tested code.  It makes sense to me, but I'd be curious to hear
> comments on this as well.
> 
> Special thanks go out to the mariusnet folks "Conner" and "Marius" for
> being so helpful and accommodating in this effort.
> 
> Woody
> 
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