Game Lobby

[liamdawe]

Hello everyone!

Just a requested for some feedback on something about the proposed Game Lobby.

My idea is simple really, i think that the game lobby should take on Spring RTS's way of doing things in the way that the lobby is external to the game. Why? - They are easier to work with than a full screen/windowed OpenGL lobby inside the game itself - makes it easier for you guys to publish updates to if it was say fixes to the lobby and not the game itself.

That and alt-tabbing on Linux is a mess, it just makes things easier on the whole.

[feneur]

Hello everyone!

Just a requested for some feedback on something about the proposed Game Lobby.

My idea is simple really, i think that the game lobby should take on Spring RTS's way of doing things in the way that the lobby is external to the game. Why? - They are easier to work with than a full screen/windowed OpenGL lobby inside the game itself - makes it easier for you guys to publish updates to if it was say fixes to the lobby and not the game itself.

That and alt-tabbing on Linux is a mess, it just makes things easier on the whole.

Hmm, just to clarify things, can you explain why you both say that alt-tabbing is a mess on Linux and wants the lobby to be external to the game? It just seems counter-intuitive to me

[liamdawe]

Alt-tabbing well i don't know of a game that runs fullscreen under Linux that you can actually alt-tab.

An external lobby meaning i can resize it at pleasure, put other windows besides it (like firefox, chrome etc) load up springlobby for SpringRTS to see what i mean.

I could be sitting in a game waiting for more players for a while, i would want to look up stuff while i wait - as just one example.

[feneur]

Ah, doing other things while you wait That's a good reason, and makes sense. Even if we go the route of having an in-game lobby you can always have the game window windowed while waiting for other players to join and make it fullscreen when actually playing (Alt+Enter toggles fullscreen/windowed).

[liamdawe]

I didn't realise alt+enter worked so easily, think it should be fine in-game then

[marsha]

If I play a Spring game I start it in window mode and switch to fullscreen with my window manager, KDE4: Alt+F3 and select fullscreen.

An external lobby is kinda nice but it shouldn't look and feel like the Spring-engine lobbies. They look like applications not games with a chat system.

I developed a bit for a few of them besides using them. The network protocol is old school, unencrypted text stream like: "LOGIN NAME PASSWORD....\n"

Not secure and easy to extend but simple to implement.

For external lobby looking at supreme commander or steam is much better.

I also commented on the game lobby for 0AD in IRC. I think it should contain features like chat, clan and matchmaking with a score/statistic system.

I would be willing to help developing a lobby server.