chat/watch thru client?

[hipposaver]

Hi, my name is Matt. I'm a huge fan of crawl (tiles version). I've beaten the game probably 20 - 30 times with multiple different races/classes. I'm also a web security "expert" <--- using that term lightly and a programmer.

I've used the online tiles and its obviously somewhat slow (having to load everything serverside is safer for cheating and tournaments but slow) and the biggest thing besides the slow feel I've noticed is how helpful it is to have other people be able to watch and to be able to ask questions. I didn't have my first win until I gathered enough information via watching/asking questions and boy did it feel good. This thread just a suggestion to add multiplayer through the client.
Now I know that probably won't work for tournaments because there isn't an anticheat (haven't checked just assuming) but the suggestion isn't for that. Having a way that people can join and watch you/ask questions would be awesome and actually playable because its client-side. The highscores would still be client-side its just for help/having some one to chat with
Also I'm sure people will attest to how boring and monotamous it can be playing by yourself, this will bring the best of both worlds (speed of playing on the client vs online AND chat/multiplayer aspect)

From a programmers standpoint I know its fairly easy to add chat to a program, not sure how difficult it would be to add a watching feature but I can't imagine its that hard.
I'm sure this has been suggested but I read the how-to and the suggestions (there wasn't even a spot to suggest this in the table of contents) but I couldn't find it so I figured I'd make this thread.


for tl;dr add chat/watch to client so we don't have to deal with the slowness of webtiles yet can have friends and learn faster via chat. (NOT intended for tournys/serverside highscores)

ps. sorry about my horrible paragraphing, im a computer nerd not a writer

[BlackSheep]

Have you tried all of the webtiles hosts to see if one is faster for you? I ask because I have no trouble imagining that it would be quite hard to modify the local game to serve up the action to a spectator.

[mumra]

I raised a similar point recently on IRC. A proper client/server online play mode in the desktop would I think have much much better performance than webtiles. There seems to be a certain amount of overhead in the browser/websocket protocol that is used which makes it way, way slower than console play online. There's also the extra overhead of communicating tile data, and also I think that a lot more of the map is visible at once. A lot of this could perhaps be streamlined. In fact there were some very recent improvements to webtiles performance by batching data packets - if you haven't played in a few days you might notice some difference.

Someone also mentioned there used to be a fork or branch called nettiles which was basically doing this kind of client/server thing. I know it would be extremely hard to do this well but not impossible I think. Anyway it might be worth looking at that version to see how they did it.

[hxy]

Some quick thoughts on how this "local game + chat" can be done:
- Use the existing webtiles server and run it on the PC. Player uses the browser to connect.
- Run a "local games directory server" somewhere.
- The PC webtiles server connects to this directory server so that there's a consolidated listing of local games in progress.
- Spectators connect to games via the directory server and use it as a proxy to watch the ongoing games.
So two places to change - the webtiles server, and the new directory server.
The directory server is also good for those cases where the internet service provider blocks direct incoming connections to home users.

[hipposaver]

wow im surprised this got so many posts so quickly (didn't realize people were active on the forums)

I've played webtiles recently, and to whoever coded it... great job, it is much better now and i know how hard it can be to send so much data so constantly.

However I'd still be interested in seeing it built into the client if only for fun