What is the official plan of action for game lobbys?

[AF]

The lobby system itself is not maintained by any one person, he spring lobby system has TASServer at the core, and there are currently 3 actively maintained lobby clients, 2 abandoned clients, and a flotilla of bots and autohosts.

As such you would not need to do anything yourselves once you've implemented the command line parameters, users would just use the same server as the spring people, and the lobby would handle everything.

Most of the battle protocols are ignored when starting glest games as they do not apply, thus implementing lest support in a dedicated lobby would be easy.

[weedkiller]

Sounds not so bad. So there are already servers which would be able to handle with glest-multiplayer.

So there's the lobbyclient which works as a seperate executable and it is used to connect people to a game.
Some choose to host and other join listed games.
If everything finds together the little programm launches Glest with parameters so that glest knows the connection details.

Some issues are still left: I'm not sure about the server-client-syncronisation; The commandline can't tell glest which gamedetails (how many playerslots/cpus also map factions techtree...) should be used. If the server adjusts this in Glest there is the problem that Glest cannot tell the lobbyprogramm; means the clients who want to join don't know when they are able to join, if there are open slots for them.

But nevertheless the lobbyprogramm could work like this: The host does everything by hand and the game is ready to launch. Then the lobbyprogramm tells the details to the players which want to join. Would still be more comfortable.

If Glest gets some more parameters it could also be possible to adjust everything in the lobbyprogramm, the server is launched some seconds before the clients and then the server starts when everybody is in.

//EDIT: a simple idea how to implement serverdetail(map/players/factions) into glest could be via a textfile; the lobbyclient writes everything into a file before it launches glest and then glest automatically uses this settings to launch the server. A additional parameter in the -host commandline could turn this on/off.

[martiño]

I've implemented some basic command line options for Glest:

glest => starts game normally
glest -server => starts the game in the new game screen with all slots open
glest -client ServerIp => starts the game in the join game screen and connects to the server specified

The port is always 61357.

Everything is in the svn, we will include it in the next version, I hope this is the end of the lobby wars.

[AF]

I will implement the changes into aflobby.

On a side note, the reason port numbers were originally part of the request was for NAT issues and allowing users to specify custom ports or make use of such things as holepunching.