Re: [Xqf-developer] this and that

[Alex B. <al...@fr...>]

On Tue, 26 Nov 2002, Ludwig Nussel wrote:

> Non-native games
>
> We already have Half-Life, Elite Force and SOF2. Jedi Knight 2 and
> Medal of Honor are based on the Q3 engine and are said to work with
> wine. Should we add more such games? There are also games that are
> supported by qstat but do not (and probably never will) work with
> wine, e.g. BF1942. Should we support those too?

I think if the game is supported by qstat, there are public masters for
the game, and people are known to play it using Wine, then I think we
should add them.  Otherwise we should not bother unless there is enough
interest in it.

This brings up another question as we add more and more games to the
list.  How do we keep the list of master servers up to date?  I think we
need to add to XQF the ability to download new master lists from inside
XQF.  The master list can be stored on the XQF web site with a list of
ADD or DEL commands to add and remove masters.  This is already in the
TODO list.

That answers how we keep the user's XQF up to date, but it doesn't answer
how we keep the list up to date.  I don't play most of the games
supported, so I have no idea what masters work and do not, and certainly
don't know when new masters appear.  Maybe in addition to the above master
support the ability to submit a master server to the XQF web site by the
user from inside of XQF.  For example, the finds a new master server for
xx game.  They can right click on it in XQF and 'Submit master address to
XQF site'.  We can then review them and add them to the official master
list.  This way the community is helping keep the master list current.
Something similar could be done for removing dead masters.

> Free games
>
> I realized that xqf only supports commercial games. I think this is
> a litte unfair and we should support free(GPL) games as well. e.g.
> FreeCiv or BzFlag. Would be handy if those games could be queried by
> some protocol that qstat already supports. Does anyone play such
> games or has contact to a maintainer?

I think it would be great to support the free / GPL games.  It would be
best if we could get it added to qstat instead of trying to support
another query program.  I don't play either, so don't know how they work.

> Icons
>
> Some icons are rather ugly and some migth have copyright problems (I
> took the Rune icon from the installed game for example) so for 1.0 I
> would like to have them replaced by nice and free ones.

I'm not very good with graphics, so it won't be me.  Copying a graphic
from inside a game would probably be a (c) problem, but how about drawing
it ourselves?  Wouldn't there still be a (c) problem?  If I was
to create a new game and used what looked like a Quake3 logo, I
assume there would be a (c) issue.

> Logo
>
> We don't have an official logo. Maybe we should start a logo
> contest. Prize is a free copy of xqf ;-)

Good idea!

> GeoIP
>
> I found a service that makes it possible to determine the country of
> an ip address (http://www.maxmind.com/). They provide a GPL library
> for that purpose. They state that they update the free database
> every month. Shall we add that feature to xqf?

It looks interesting.  For starters I think it should be optional when
compiling.

> Detecting installed maps
>
> I recently played a little with detecting which maps are installed
> for quake3. It is quite easy but we need some code with zlib license
> and we need to link against zlib to be able to look inside pk3
> files. Is that ok?

I think it's a good idea, but it would be nice if it was also optional
when compiling.

I assume you are talking about http://www.gzip.org/zlib/, right?  Is there
any issue with license (GPL vs zlib's license)?

Alex