GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 392280
Add ICS networking support
Last modified: 2018-05-22 12:18:39 UTC
glChess needs to be able to play network games. The obvious protocol is the Internet Chess Server protocol (ICS). Unfortunately this is not well documented so the protocol will be quite fuzzy. The first server to work with should be the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) at freechess.org. For LAN play glChess can provide a cut-down ICS server it advertises using Avahi (Zeroconf/Bonjour). The join game dialog should contain a list of Internet servers (e.g. FICS) and any locally detected servers.
Absolutely, networking in glChess should get very high priority, after GNOME 2.18.0 is been released. So this is something we can work on getting right during the 2.20.x development cycle. For the network protocol, I think that both ICS and support through GGZ would be ideal. (glChess can support both). GGZ is a network support framework for making it easier to create networked games, which gnome-games already uses. GGZ already has a server for chess, which could easily be adapted to take glChess as a client. And we have a server at games.gnome.org, which we host ourselves. And the GGZ developers are generally very helpful in accepting development requests and suggestions. More info here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGames/Multiplayer
I have already made some progress on this, see lib/glchess/chess/fics and http://bobthegnome.blogspot.com/2007/01/sneak-peak.html Personally I think FICS is a little too complicated and unleashing the hordes of Gnome users on their community may not be a good idea immediately. For that reason I have made no more progress on FICS and would suggest we get GGZ working first. GGZ would be the default option with FICS left for more power users to find.
I'm working on GGZ support currently... The work is in the sf.net version because it is a) very unstable and b) this repository is faster to work on. Hopefully there will be basic support ported to 2.19 soon :)
GGZ support is now working in 2.22. Needs more work for configuration etc...
Excellent work, Robert! Network support will be a very exciting new feature in glChess. Now, you have to update POTFILES.in. Take a look here: http://l10n.gnome.org/module/gnome-games You can detect these kinds of errors (and others!) by running 'make distcheck'. It would also be a good idea to ask the GGZ people to setup a server for glChess on their GGZ server (gnome.ggzgamingzone.org). That way it will get a lot of testing before unleased upon real users when 2.22.0 is released.
*** Bug 486296 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The networking support in glChess is looking very good at the moment. However, there is a UI freeze on January 28th, and a string freeze shortly thereafter. It would therefore be great if the network support could be finalized before the UI freeze hits us.
I looked into this a good few months back and my understanding is that glChess is compatible with our (GGZ) existing chess game so it can use the existing chess room on the server. Please do let me know if this isn't the case.
The networking support is complete in that I can play on a GGZ server against the reference GGZ GTK Chess client. I haven't had any feedback (positive or negative) if this works well and haven't seen anyone in the Chess room to play against. There is no support in glChess for configuring the GGZ accounts as it uses the config file used in the other Gnome/GGK GTK+ application. This is not ideal but I have no plans to implement this change before the 2.22 release. For 2.24 I want to look at splitting the GGZ login code out of glChess and into a separate application like the GGZ GTK client does. This will make it more clear why you can't simultaneously play Chess and Nibbles with the same account. I also need to look into the value of keeping the existing Python GGZ implementation or using the GGZ Python bindings.
Obviously still problems in 2.22, see bug 538687 - is that a packaging fault of the distro?
Updating to reflect that GGZ support is provided, so this relates to adding FICS support.
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