Simple Game Server -- request for help

[Jim Lyons]

Alex, thanks for the info, very helpful. Thanks also to Stephen, Mark, and Björnke. It sounds like I am back to the original idea, a slow polling arrangement with a simple http/CGI server. This will do for the immediate need, which is just for some programming students to play around with.

I saw from Björnke's chat server that I should be looking at IRC protocol for anything more sophisticated. It looks like there are some Simple Scripts at On-Rev I can look into for that. (I don't have private server to use.) Thanks again for the pointers. I will report back if I happen to make any progress with this.

Jim

On May 30, 2011, at 7:12 PM, Alex Tweedly wrote:

> But if you don't have (or don't want to require) a private server, then it is quite feasible to do it all with http.
> 
> You don't need to do simple "second-by-second" polling. You can do what I call "slow polling" ....
<snip>
> I would make the server as simple and generic as possible. I would put absolutely no game logic in it, so that one server would handle many different games. I would not even give the server any concepts of "turns", nor have the clients direct their messages to the opponent. I'd have each game have an identifier, and have every 'move', and every 'listen', include that identifier as a url parameter (and use that game id as the name of the file to store the moves on the server). That way, you can have 2-player or mulitple-player games, you can add text chat, etc. without changing the server.