[Twisted-Python] Internet services for online gaming teams.

[Paul Rudin]

Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> writes:

> I'm curious how you're planning to do the integration with existing
> game servers, since those tend to be pretty tricky to communicate with.

I think I have to be realistic in that some existing software - the
game server and the voice comms server might be hard to integrate
fully. Nevertheless many game servers provide have things like the
ability to administer them remotely; a fairly rich scripting language;
built in web servers for remote administration and in game irc
clients.

I suppose that for each game it might be necessary to write a proxy
that knew how to talk to the game server on one side and the rest of
the system on the other. For games with rich scripting languages it
might be possible to have scripts running both client and server side
for games that were able to integrate with the rest of the system.

The trouble is that (even to the extent it's possible) you need to
code something for each game.

However many games do provide a consistent mechanism for querying them
about the current gamestate. So in the first instance one could simply
provide web forms and functionality in irc bots that allows you to
find out where team mates are playing, and what's happening on the
game servers that you control.

> 
> And, I'll plug it again: many of the features you're describing are
> already on the timetable for Quotient: http://www.divmod.org/ .  I'm
> spending a lot of time on that these days :).
> 

Thanks - I'll take a look.

> Twisted is an excellent toolkit for building these sorts of apps, but
> don't underestimate the difficulty of the problem.  Especially, it
> sounds like you need a loosely coupled, wide-area distributed,
> peer-to-peer persistence system (or possibly, object database).  This
> problem can be as hard as you want to make it, so you probably want to
> have a slightly better idea of what services you want to provide
> beyond "providing access to the same distributed persistent
> information".
> 

Yes - I think some reading up on peer-to-peer systems would do me some
good. 



> I know because I've been thinking about this problem for the past 4
> years or so and I haven't really come up with anything yet :).


I have an advantage: being almost completely ignorant of this area I
don't realise how hard the problem is :-)



Anyway in the short term I think I should do two things - I'll sit
down and write a better description of of what I'd like to produce
without worrying too much how it'll be achieved, and I'll start
writing little some very little programs just to gain some familiarity
with twisted,