Re: Progress

[Stan Shebs <shebs@cygnus.com>]

   From: Zachariah Baum <zack@studioarchetype.com>
   Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 10:37:23 -0700

   shebs@cygnus.com said:
   > I'm rethinking the multi-player game setup again, looking at allowing
   > the players to chat while the host chooses game and variants.  I
   > haven't seen any existing multi-player setups that have the
   > flexibility that Xconq demands, but am always ready to hear
   > suggestions... 

   I'm involved in the Worldforge project, that's using an XML-like protocol for
     client-server communication called Atlas.  It's general enough that it can
     cover most client/server relationships, like distributed servers.  It's still
     in its early stages, but the main developer is doing a lot of coding, and 
     he's pretty talented.  I've been working on using the system as its in alpha,
     and debugging it a little.
   Check it out:
     http://www.worldforge.org/website/protocols/

As it happens, I was cruising the site last week, but didn't look closely
at the protocols - I'll go back.

   I like the idea of chat in these sorts of systems.  a lot of other games like
     this ignore the human interaction a little too much.

Multiplayer games on a LAN generally work by direct communication (i.e.
yelling over the cubicle wall), and I've seen people stay on the phone
during the game, so it seems clear that Internet play needs something.
It would be cool to have a voice-over-IP hack, but I have more than
enough hacking to do without tackling that!

   I vote that it's a safe assumption that people have tcl installed on their
     systems.  Have you looked at other configure scripts that do the whole
     tclConfig.sh thing?  I know that tk looks for tcl in an elegant fashion...

Yeah, the current script looks for tclConfig.sh and tkConfig.sh.
However, if you have tcl in a *sub*directory, things get interesting
orderingwise, and rather than take still more time from graphics and
AI, I wanted to see about going around the problem entirely.

								Stan