[jdev] how to program a jabber game server

[Ralph Meijer]

On Fri, 2007-02-09 at 10:21 +0000, Richard Dobson wrote:
> > Instead, I would opt for using a vanilla MUC service and write a bot
> > that owns the room. That should allow plenty control.
> >   
> Exactly, which is what I am doing as part of it for the in game chat, 
> the only problem with using MUC is that you cannot use it for the 
> distribution of game state in most cases as a lot of games require that 
> each player has only a subset of the complete state, i.e. in a scrabble 
> game players cannot see what letters each of the other players has or in 
> a poker game you cannot see what cards the other players are holding etc 
> etc, so the game state in those cases needs to be distributed directly 
> individually to each player, also move/actions in the game need to be 
> sent directly to the "game host" (the bot or component) and cannot be 
> just be broadcasted in the room by each player as the game host needs to 
> verify those moves (and given the opportunity to reject them if they are 
> illegal or wrong) before the game state is updated.

Yes, of course. I'd say that you just private messages [1] for that. I
don't think it matters too much that the messages don't originate from
the room itself, and for clients that don't have a specialized game UI,
I think it is very intuitive to interact with a game master.

[1] http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html#privatemessage

> Also as pointed out by Michal the protocol needs to be able to support 
> operation without a server so it would be better if it wasn't tied to 
> MUC and would work without it, without the protocol being much if any 
> different.

I haven't fully read the thread, but I'm not sure why that would be
true.

-- 
Groetjes,

ralphm