Server Browser Webservice
ChromeAngel
Join Date: 2002-01-24 Member: 14Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
If NS2 game servers exposed their status as a web service using SOAP it would make it much easier for server operators to build websites to monitor their servers.
Plus I would like some way of indicating which servers are running a given map on NS2World <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink-fix.gif" />
Steam uses it's own protocol which makes querying this kind of thing fiddly, but now you have the M4xX0r engine it opens up the possibility of easier integration.
Plus I would like some way of indicating which servers are running a given map on NS2World <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink-fix.gif" />
Steam uses it's own protocol which makes querying this kind of thing fiddly, but now you have the M4xX0r engine it opens up the possibility of easier integration.
Comments
In fact, Firefox is open source right? What would stop you from including a simple web browser based on Gecko into the actual source code (as a plugin, so that you didn't have to open all your code of course), but a plugin that was preinstalled.
It would be pretty amazing to have an integrated web browser, because then you could run applets like an irc channel from within the game. With LUA you could then make those applets launch or display in the game.
The only problem would be security. I would probably default all potential security problems to off (even javascript and cookies). Then when players trusted a server, they could turn on their plugins.
I would like to see it. easier to deal with imo.
A) It's not <i>that</i> well documented
B) Not as many as handle SOAP
The only downside I can see with my suggestion is that being XML based the messages are bloated out with all the <tags><tags/> stuff, so they would use a little more bandwidth than a steam browser protocol.
Even if UWE choose not to implment this it might be a viable to build a server side LUA mod to do this in addition to whatever protocol NS2 ends up using. I'm not sure of the capacities if LUA/Evolution in this area.
Could do, but then you're getting into the area of all the clients having to write parsers again. I don't know how often servers get queried, but compared to the game/voice traffic I imagine the XML bloat in the odd server query would be negligible.