Miniature/Wishlist/Real-time P2P Miniature

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# Session negotiation
# Session negotiation
# Protocol
# Protocol
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# Interoperability
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# Save/resume
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# Observing games?
+
-
# Status notification
+
# Error recovery
# Error recovery
 +
# Calendar integration
 +
# Status notification
 +
# Observing games
==Progress==
==Progress==

Revision as of 17:21, 11 January 2010

Contents

Goal

Play chess online directly against a contact, without a chess server in between.

To be implemented using Telepathy a framework supported in the Maemo platform. The intent is to not only have network play via Telepathy working for Miniature, but to make such a Telepathy framework available for other games, too (targeting the Maemo platform).

Checklist

  1. Session negotiation
  2. Protocol
  3. Save/resume
  4. Error recovery
  5. Calendar integration
  6. Status notification
  7. Observing games

Progress

Mockups

Backstage

Session negotiation

How would two peers start a game of chess via network?

  1. P1 selects contact - Telepathy needs to know which contacts have Miniature installed?
  2. P2 receives an offer to play a game of chess and can accept/reject - Is this UI already part of Miniature?
    1. P2 rejects: P1 receives a message that 1) tells P1's list of Miniature contacts that P2 is not available for a certain amout of time, 2) cancels the P2P game dialog for P1.
    2. P2 accepts: P1 receives a message that P2 accepted and both advance to the next screen (for now, that's the chess board), and the actual game start is already handled by the XBoard protocol.

Protocol

It is safe to assume that each game has some own internal protocol to transfer game states. For chess engines, XBoard/WinBoard is the standard protocol. But we also need to be able to interface with FICS/ICS.

Interestingly enough, most chess bots that play on FICS probably don't implement the network protocol themselves but instead use XBoard. XBoard then interfaces with FICS for them.

FICS details (not strictly P2P related)

The various intro-* help pages for FICS seem to explain everything we'd need (basics, general, information, moving, playing, analysis, settings, talking).

Playing on FICS would happen via telnet (telnet freechess.org), perhaps Telepathy could also handle the connection management for that. This would reduce the risk to maintain two different code bases in Miniature (P2P, FICS) that eventually do the same. My hope is that Miniature only needs to know about XBoard whereas P2P/FICS/ICS would all happen in the Telepathy component.

On a side note: It also seems to be common for network games to have those two protocols - one for finding games (a game servers browser of some sort, see [1]) and one for the actual game. The separation into two truly distinct protocols might rarely exist (again, see FICS).

Interoperability

With XBoard it would seem trivial to play chess across application boundaries.

Observing games

Observing games is an important aspect in social gaming. On FICS, observers are known as kibitz. Can that be done with Telepathy, too?

Status notification

Tell other users in my contacts list about my chess game.

Error recovery

When to abort a connection etc.

Telepathy tubes Details 

- Compiling Miniature for maemo (it's really needed for now?)
- Compiling telepathy-qt4 for maemo (?)
- Creating session controller, connection server
- Getting local contact list
- Creating tubes connection between clients to sending Miniature data's
Retrieved from "http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature/Wishlist/Real-time_P2P_Miniature"