They proliferate like rabbits

[Cubex]

Modified to reflect Spring lobbies reality

(just replaced "standard(s)" word acordingly, now purist hate me with your mouse and keyb)
Original comic from http://xkcd.com/927/

[SinbadEV]

I was totally thinking "wow, what a mess, we need a new better ultra-lobby"... but then I remembered I was lazy.

Incidentally, in my random searching for an existing generic lobby client framework I found someone on some random game's forum suggesting they adapt springlobby. I lo'ed.

[luckywaldo7]

http://springrts.com/wiki/Lobby_Development

It seems there are 5 considered 'usable', only two of which are cross-platform, only one of which is open source.

I suppose the relevance is that there is to be considered a 'main' lobby, there is only really one choice.

[PicassoCT]

I know the sollution to this. A arena, sand, sharp objects and tigers. This is calling for a fight to the death!

[Jools]

Why do lobbies need to be cross-platform? Why can't just every platform have its own lobby? I use Tasclient which I like. There are no big problems with it, just some occasional crash when you shut it down.

[Vladimir]

yeah TAS Client is still the best

[PicassoCT]

So do we put all the others down? End the soffaring once and for all?
Or do we castrate them? If we let this continue unchecked, we will face exponential growth eventually. Nobody in here wants Realworld TribalTribbleTrouble?

Also, the stains on the trousers - were the lobbies dryhumped your leg.

[smoth]

so far, my 2 faves are SL and NOTALobby. SL feels more powerful than notalobby and is open source. Where as notalobby is nice and easy to use, without the control that my inner nerd loves and is closed source(currently).

For me personally, I prefer SL but for most people, I would point them to nota lobby.

[Vladimir]

Both SL and NOTA lobby look like the kind of amateur UIs I created during my A-levels using visual studio. It is so evident that they were just thrown together by some random guy who wanted to practice making a simple IRC type app, lacking knowledge of all basic design principles and no attempt made to make it actually run smoothly without crashing every 2 seconds

Whereas TAS client is the time-tested original official client that has been properly coded, properly designed, with maximum functionality and the ability to actually customize the layout, skins, colours and icons

I think deep down everyone knows it's the best client but it is ignored simply because it is exclusive to windows

[luckywaldo7]

Why do lobbies need to be cross-platform? Why can't just every platform have its own lobby? I use Tasclient which I like. There are no big problems with it, just some occasional crash when you shut it down.

Why would you want the need to support 3 different lobbies instead of one?

Both SL and NOTA lobby look like the kind of amateur UIs I created during my A-levels using visual studio. It is so evident that they were just thrown together by some random guy who wanted to practice making a simple IRC type app, lacking knowledge of all basic design principles and no attempt made to make it actually run smoothly without crashing every 2 seconds

Whereas TAS client is the time-tested original official client that has been properly coded, properly designed, with maximum functionality and the ability to actually customize the layout, skins, colours and icons

I think deep down everyone knows it's the best client but it is ignored simply because it is exclusive to windows

Ha.

[smoth]

LOL Vladimir

[Nemo]

Been thinking about writing a lobby using nodejs and one of the webkit frontends so it'd be easily skin-able (pure html/css) for various games. choice is good, yeah?

[dansan]

The idea is good, but one of the biggest (intentional) obstacles is that web browsers cannot easily execute local programs and read+write everywhere on your hard disk. But you need the unitsync library to check for maps+mods and download maps+mods and you must start spring.exe ofc.

Additionally the lobby protocol assumes a steady tcp connection per client. With a browser that is difficult to do, and on the server side you'd have to open a connection per logged in user and keep processing the data stream for all users. You'd have to make sure to close it, when he closes the web app or he'll have problems switching to another client.

Weblobby (http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... t=weblobby) used java client side to accomplish this, but for me it never really worked reliably.

Hum.. just thought maybe all of that doesn't apply, if you had in mind to use the rendering engine in a dedicated GUI.... gtk+ or qt would be multi-platform and can incorporate webkit.... Suddenly this post feels useless :D

[smoth]

Been thinking about writing a lobby using nodejs and one of the webkit frontends so it'd be easily skin-able (pure html/css) for various games. choice is good, yeah?

Sounds neat. I still have yet to see a lobby replace Springlobby for flexibility and power but if you setup a lobby that I can skin using just html and css, that sounds interesting!

[Nemo]

dansan: yeah, the unitsync stuff would probably have to be a native node.js module (C/C++), then node would handle all of the system interaction stuff (keeping the TCP connection open, reading/writing files, etc.). I have no idea how unitsync works, maybe it'd be possible to have a really simple native binding and do most of the lifting in javascript.

There are a few projects like http://appjs.org/ which basically take Chromium (or lower level WebKit bindings) and point it at a locally running node server. Not the lightest-weight solution in the world (any distributed package ends up including a platform-appropriate install of both nodejs and chromium), but 40mb isn't all that much space anymore. So yes, you were right on by the end of your post

[SpliFF]

I'm keen to get an in-engine lobby server and client working via luasocket and chilli. As always lack of time has prevented me getting very far but when I do have it this is a high priority for me.

I'm pretty sure the main hurdle right now is that you can't run widgets in the pre-game screen. I can probably hack around this for now by having the launcher start a "lobby mod" to bypass the frontend entirely.

I'm open to collaboration if someone wanted to help with this.

[smoth]

If i wasn't leaving in a few days .

[CarRepairer]

Weblobby (http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... t=weblobby) used java client side to accomplish this, but for me it never really worked reliably.

Try it again. I started working on it a few days ago. It can now support multi-engines so you don't even have to install spring first. I got it working in Windows and Linux64. Linux currently only has version 93.2 static build so you can only join games hosted with that engine version. Mac is WIP, been having trouble getting it to reliably download.

[klapmongool]

TASclient ftw!