Hi, my first post on the new board since the old one crashed. Some of you may remember me as the guy that made Word War vi ( http://wordwarvi.sf.net )
Anyway, on to my question. Is there any open source generic game lobby library?
What I envision is a generic game lobby, not specific to any particular game, which has a server side that operates on a well known port, and a client side, which games would use to register their active game-specific servers with these generic game lobby server(s) and then the game-specific clients can connect to these generic game lobby servers to get connection info (ip addr/port/protocol) to the game specific servers.
Make sense? Hope so. Point being that 1) not every game should implement its own lobby (maybe it's own lobby UI, but not the lobby network code) and 2) by having such a widely adopted standard for game lobbies, then even unpopular, obscure games can have good lobby service availability.
Well, perusing the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, iana.org, I find in the port numbers section, udp/tcp ports 2914 are called "gamelobby", which sounds very promising. But so far I have not found any documentation for the protocol used on these ports, nor mention of libraries that use this port, nor any idea where I might find generic game lobby servers offering service on this port.
Anybody know?
Seems nuts to write yet another (and doubtless insecure) under-served game-specific game lobby, or even an unlikely-to-be-adopted attempt of my own at a generic game lobby protocol and library, as, surely, surely, if anything is sane in this world, one must exist by now already.
Anybody know about this topic? Any pointers?
Thanks,
-- steve