On Sat, 12 Jan 2008, Richard Dobson wrote:
Sure exactly, as I said you need some kind of neutral third party for a lot of games, be that a server or a bot it doesnt matter, but you cant do as the previous poster seemed to suggest (as far as I read it) and just use bog standard MUC and RPC between the players for all games.
Just to be clear, I *did* mean that we have a referee bot in the MUC. (The bot is the entity that sets up the MUC, in fact, although it currently doesn't use any MUC administrator functions beyond that.)
I also want to address this bit from an earlier post: Torsten Grote <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
In my opinion this is one big hindrance for a large-scale adoption of Jabber. A fast growing pool of interoperable and fascinating games would drive many users to create and use Jabber accounts.
What we've found is that there's no need to drive people towards Jabber accounts -- you say "use your Livejournal or Google Chat address" and everyone's there. Or you tell them to register on a web site (people do that six times a day anyway) and then provision them a Jabber account. ("Plays games, plus you can chat with it!")
The sticky point is getting people to download software. We find, in this day and age, that people won't play a game unless it runs in software they already have. That's a big obstacle for Jabber gaming: you want that to be a *fast-growing* pool of games, but nobody is going to download a new client update every week because another game came out.
Our solution was to have a custom client which could download individual game plugins itself. (In the form of Javascript code.) That worked great, but then nobody downloaded the custom client in the first place.
The current plan is to grit our teeth and make it a web app. Yes, it's a cliche, but people have web browsers and they expect everything to run in them. We're still using Jabber on the back end, so they will still get chat and federation with all the other Jabber users of the world.
We realize that "Jabber on the back end" doesn't do much for XMPP advocacy, but it's better than nothing, and our primary goal is to get people playing games. Whatever that takes.
The only flaw with the current plan is that it's a lot of work and it's not done yet. :/
--Z -- "And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..." * When Bush says "Stay the course," what he means is "I don't know what to do next." He's been saying this for years now.
