New game in lobby notifier

[TotalNoob]

Hi

I thought of making a simple program, which would be hidden in systray checking master.megaglest.org website for new games and notify somehow if any new appears. It is better to have a lightweight small app instead of keeping MG turned on and waiting for the trumpet notification. I thought to make it in C++ or Java so it would be portable between OS. I've already been doing such a thing. In travian game I made an app which notified me if someone attacks my village so I didn't have to check this every few minutes In all it's just a simple parse of website content, to be done in few hours with testing (if we concern Java). I just thought that before I start the work I would gather some opinions about the idea.

Please comment, especially if you have idea how to make task even easier

[titi]

Just one comment: Yes, please do it!

[Coldfusionstorm]

Yes, and 

this is a very usefull feature, and id like to see it

[softcoder]

We could also make a commandline option in mg to do this?

--notify-internet-games

maybe it would run in a special mode, then launch the game and connect with proper settings too!

Go ahead and do it, we could port the code into mg later

[tomreyn]

Yeay, I'd really like to see something like this (but not written in java, please!). Please don't parse the web interface for this, there's a much better option. Please contact me on IRC for details.

[titi]

I want java  . By this its cross platform! Beside iphones 

[tomreyn]

How about C++ and QT? Then it can be cross-platform, too.
I'm just not happy with the memory footprint java applications usually have. I have yet to see a java application which eats less than a couple dozen megabytes of RAM just to display an icon.

[will]

I want java  . By this its cross platform! Beside iphones 

Java isn't iphone, and iphone has a notification system you'd use instead of a background app.  Android is java, but again there's a notification system you'd use rather than running an app.

A good idea might be an RSS feed, because then you can all use our favorite RSS tickers to be told about games.  RSS can be set to be quite close polling, say every minute or so, and if the load becomes high there are free syndicate servers we can (ab)use.

There's nothing stopping multiple approaches, but RSS seems a good thing that enables others.

[titi]

I think the information system should be more "aggressive", so RSS is not the right way.
Just think about when and how you want to use it?

Its typically that you want to play, but noone is there to play. Now you simply start the app and wait....
If there is a server ( or maybe ankind of other action ) the hidden app should pop up and maybe play a sound or music to tell you something is going on.

All this behaviour should be configurable:
1.When to inform you:
- new user in lobby
- new host
- new user in lobby saying somehting
... ?

2. the way you are notified:
- blinking
- playing sound
- start to play music
- popping application to foreground
....

and maybe customizable each notification kind to each kind of event!
This is nothing you can do with a rss feed.

[will]

How about using IRC then?

[tomreyn]

I think an XML newsfeed isn't a bad approach really. In my opinion a custom RSS client could cover all of the use cases described above. We could also consider using FOAF (push instead of pull) but this would only work with a small number of recipients.

[softcoder]

I like Will's idea... the MG game could send info to an IRC channel as things change.. anyone on the channel gets the messages. Very simplke and works with an existing infrastructure!

[Ishmaru]

How would this effect standalone mods?

[tomreyn]

They would probably have their own master server and thus a separate channel.

[will]

If you use freenode then standalone can announce in the same chanel

[tomreyn]

I like the idea of announcing to IRC, because I already use IRC, but I also think this is something different than what this thread was originally about:

[..] a simple program, which would be hidden in systray checking master.megaglest.org website for new games and notify somehow if any new appears.

I don't see how publishing to an IRC channel would offer this.

Of course you could write a bot which announces servers to IRC, and a cross platform client application which connects to IRC and uses whatever the window manager provides to create notifications based on what is published in a given channel. But this seems more complicated than an RSS reader OR custom HTTP client which just takes output from a website and creates notifications out of this. The IRC variant would also depend on availability and proper operation of two, not just one service.

So I think having an IRC bot could be nice - but in addition to what is being discussed here.

[AnimalWarrioR]

tricky! but I'm reading about it ^ _ ^! 

[Coldfusionstorm]

i vote for a c++ app, I don't like java either, its just not performance friendly.