Developement-level discussion of Volity, a network protocol and programming framework for Internet game-playing.

Lobbies

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My holiday rampage through long-overdue parts of the 1.0 protocol (huh? 
wuzzat?) continues. Lobbies are actually sort of a side-effect of the 
game browser, which I'm still drafting, but I think they're important.

http://www.volity.org/wiki/index.cgi?Lobby

A lobby is a multi-user chat dedicated to discussion of a specific 
ruleset, allowing players interested in that game to find one another 
and socialize outside of formal tables.

  There is nothing technologically special about a lobby; it's just an 
ordinary MUC. However, the bookkeeper knows about its location, and 
well-behaved client applications can easily guide players to a 
ruleset's lobby, with the bookkeeper's help.

  Discovering lobbies

Any client that can use service discovery (which is to say, any 
self-respecting client) can easily discover a lobby's JabberID. It need 
only send a disco items request to the bookkeeper, with a node 
comprising the ruleset's URI followed by the string |lobby. (That's a 
"pipe" character, then the word "lobby".)

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Doug Orleans | 28 Nov 20:59

Re: Lobbies

Jason McIntosh writes:
 > Any client that can use service discovery (which is to say, any 
 > self-respecting client) can easily discover a lobby's JabberID. It need 
 > only send a disco items request to the bookkeeper, with a node 
 > comprising the ruleset's URI followed by the string |lobby. (That's a 
 > "pipe" character, then the word "lobby".)

I still don't like this pipe convention...  Why not have the disco
info for the ruleset URI include a "lobby" field?  Same goes for
"servers", although we'd have to have a convention for putting
multiple JIDs into a single string (whitespace-separated would be my
preference, but perhaps comma-separated is more conventional).

I've also been thinking about RDF, which is a mechanism (and concrete
XML syntax) for representing arbitrary directed graphs whose nodes and
edges are labeled with URIs.  This might be a more natural fit for
this Resource Description task, but it's also Yet Another Technology.

--dougo <at> place.org

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Jason McIntosh | 28 Nov 23:06

Re: Lobbies

On Nov 28, 2004, at 2:59 PM, Doug Orleans wrote:

> Jason McIntosh writes:
>> Any client that can use service discovery (which is to say, any
>> self-respecting client) can easily discover a lobby's JabberID. It 
>> need
>> only send a disco items request to the bookkeeper, with a node
>> comprising the ruleset's URI followed by the string |lobby. (That's a
>> "pipe" character, then the word "lobby".)
>
> I still don't like this pipe convention...  Why not have the disco
> info for the ruleset URI include a "lobby" field?  Same goes for
> "servers", although we'd have to have a convention for putting
> multiple JIDs into a single string (whitespace-separated would be my
> preference, but perhaps comma-separated is more conventional).

You can actually put a list of discrete values into a single Jabber 
data form field. 
http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0004.html#protocol-results

However, if we moved all server information into the form, my concern 
is that every info query to a ruleset node would blast you with 
_everything_ the bookkeeper knows about that ruleset -- the servers, 
the ui files, and categories of information we haven't thought of yet. 
I don't know if that is optimal behavior.

And I don't see how using a pipe as a field separator is any worse than 
using a comma, anyway. :)

> I've also been thinking about RDF, which is a mechanism (and concrete

(Continue reading)