Aseba connexions over Internet

[stephanemagnenat]

The recent and ongoing work on unifying Switch shall lead to the easy discovery of Aseba targets and robots on the local network (see issue #543). However, events such as R2T2 (https://www.thymio.org/en:thymio-r2t2) require discovery over Internet. This is the same problem as matchmaking in video games, for instance the Unity3D framework provides a NetworkMatch class for this feature.

In the context of future R2T2 event, a similar mechanism for Aseba is desirable. I have been looking around for potential existing solutions:

• In the past, I developed a solution for Globulation 2 (https://globulation2.org/wiki/Main_Page) that simply uses IRC as server. While vampirising public IRC for that purpose might not be very nice, it is possible to deploy a private IRC server. The approach has the advantage of not requiring the writing of a server and allow humans to see which games are available, but it is not secure at all.
• Recent version of Globutlation 2 come with a custom match-making protocol. However the server is in C++ and not extremely documented so this is probably not the optimal solution.
• Recent open-source RTS games have developed their own solution, see for instance https://github.com/SFTtech/openage-masterserver. However, these are custom-tailored to their need, both at the level of the protocol and the implementation.

The goal of this issue is to provide a place to discuss the feature needs in the context of R2T2-like events, and the possible technical solutions.

[stephanemagnenat]

There has been discussions online about using IRC for matchmaking (http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/8398/implementing-match-making-community-system-for-multiplayer-games). Moreover, it seems other games than Globulation have been using IRC (see for instance http://wiki.popre.net/Matchmaker_(Reincarnated)).

In the current context, I believe a good start would be implementing a simplistic IRC-based discovery service, using the same fields as the ones for mDNS-SD (see issue #543).