OpenRA Lobby

[Vigor]

Hey!

I want to make a lobby where people can chat and see for open games and join them easily, perhaps even autodownload the mod if they don't have it.

I find the current way of joining in games too troublesome. Few reasons:
- Game state doesn't update automatically.
- Hard to play other mods than RA; you need to switch mod to host it, and by default you don't see other mods than RA.
- Need to keep OpenRA game executable open while waiting for a game.
- No possibility to make good after-game chat. (people tend to quit quickly from the game).
- No possibility to send private messages to keep contact with players.
- No ranks to balance the games better.
- Colors are often too similar; automatic color set would be good.

Things I would like to know for the game room functionality:
- How to create/remove a game room?
- How to start a game?
- How to alter players information, such as team number, or to kick player, and to spec player?
- How to read/send the join/quit/etc messages?

[wusche1]

Hello Vigor!

It is great to see another willing codor on the horizon. I would advise you to go to the OpenRA chat (#openra on webchat.freenode.net). You will find that some of the developers can be found frequently there and are very much willing to help with your project.

I want to make a lobby where people can chat and see for open games and join them easily, perhaps even autodownload the mod if they don't have it.

Interesting approach. And probably worthwile considering the fact the for some reasons, RA is the by far dominating mod.

I find the current way of joining in games too troublesome. Few reasons:
- Game state doesn't update automatically.
- Hard to play other mods than RA; you need to switch mod to host it, and by default you don't see other mods than RA.
- Need to keep OpenRA game executable open while waiting for a game.
- No possibility to make good after-game chat. (people tend to quit quickly from the game).
- No possibility to send private messages to keep contact with players.
- No ranks to balance the games better.
- Colors are often too similar; automatic color set would be good.

These are very good points, some of them I wish to have in-game myself. Especially the auto-coloring is important. Who doesn't hate to have a game full of green players..

Cheers,

--wuschel

[xan2622]

Hi.

Here is an idea I had 3 months ago for a new Game Lobby:
https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/2815

Btw, Scott has started working on the IRC support.

And wusche1 is right, please join the OpenRA IRC channel:
[url]irc://chat.freenode.net/openra[/url]

See you !

[Vigor]

IRC based lobby sounds interesting idea. But will it be flexible enough to allow all the features we can think of?

For what I care, is to get something working. I don't mind if it's IRC lobby or not, I only want to get some common meeting point for the players, and easy access for the games is my main goal.

I don't want to wait many years to get a lobby working for the sake of making it perfect. So, it doesn't matter if it's not perfect, all I care is that it works and makes life a little bit easier.

Main features I'm looking forward to:
- Check for games without running OpenRA.
- Join to games easily; possibly create autohosts for all mods to make them played too.
- Chat with others, PM with others, create friends list.
- "ready to play" mode: automatically create a game when enough players are in that mode; quick way to start a game. Most people are afraid to create a room if nobody has joined one yet; they probably feel that nobody is online.
- Most importantly: ranks. This will make the games less frustrating when you can make better balanced teams. This would require changes to OpenRA though, to signal the server who won the game.

[Matt]

You could combine something like http://openra.mailaender.name/games/ with http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=openra in a web interface if you don't want to contribute to the OpenRA project directly and get some results fast with minimal effort. Alternatively you could set up a site similar to http://wesnoth.gamingladder.info/ whose source code is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gamingladder/

See https://github.com/ScottNZ/OpenRA/compare/irc for the current in-game IRC client in the making which currently is a draggable box and connecting to irc.open-ra.org similar to the plan of CnCNet who are now using IRC as a backend for everything.