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quadra-game / quadra

An addictive action puzzle game with single player and multiplayer capabilities (Internet or LAN).
GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
28 stars 18 forks source link

web-based game browser #58

Open pphaneuf opened 10 years ago

pphaneuf commented 10 years ago

A suggested feature was to make a web-based game browser to replace QSnoop. It could be based on AJAX and such.

pphaneuf commented 10 years ago

Using AJAX techniques would be nice, but I'd rather write the 20 lines of javascript needed to parse the Dict format than use any XML at all.

The installer for windows already makes an association for MIME type application/x- quadra-server (as well as a different one for .qrec recordings which could be used to view highscore games). The format is simply an IP address in text form that the client should connect to. Qserv could serve up documents of that type to enable connecting to a server from a web page.

Caveat 1: I wouldn't be surprised if Vista (or even XP) frowned upon that manner of starting applications. An annoying "are you sure you trust this" popup might appear.

Caveat 2: I'm not sure Firefox honors those associations on windows. Annoying popups might apply there as well.

Caveat 3: We'll need to add similar stuff to the OS X and Linux installers. They will also have to work with the various browsers used on those platforms.

Caveat 4: Implementing this will merely highlight the fact that Quadra itself should've been a Flash application in the first place :).

All in all, that seems like a bit of a porting marathon to me... We should discuss other options before accepting this as is. Example: make our own simplified QSnoop based on existing Quadra code.

pphaneuf commented 10 years ago

Oh, when I say AJAX, I certainly don't mean to use XML! The thing used for making HTTP requests is called xmlHttpRequest, but the XML is there for no particular reason, you can get whatever you want and parse it however you want. Most applications actually use JSON, I'm told...

This idea is quite low priority (reflecting that in the metadata now), IMHO. Just something that might be intriguing to explore. In fact, a fan knowledgeable in those programming techniques could very well do it without our help at all!

The main trick is how to start Quadra from a web page. This isn't exactly rocket science, but how to do this so that it works on a number of platforms isn't obvious. RealPlayer has been doing this kind of this for a long time, so I'm guessing it's possible (even on Linux), but what needs to be done exactly in the installer?

Quadra doesn't suck nearly as much as most Flash games, IMHO! Multiplayer games are pretty rare (in fact, I don't remember ever seeing one), and fullscreen usually sucks pretty badly.

I'm not really sure about writing more native code... Maybe it's the Google kool-aid affecting my brain, but this sounds like the kind of thing that's trivial to do, and reduce the barrier to entry. I'm certainly not about to do anything about this right now either way, so whoever writes code will probably automatically win the argument. :-)