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[pygame] a gsoc idea: networking
I'm making a game similar to fantastic contraption (
http://fantasticcontraption.com/ ). One of the cool features of that
game is that users can create their own levels and solutions, and they
can be shared, ranked and played by other players. I'd love to have
that functionality, but like many pygame developers I'm writing a free
game, and I'm too poor to host that kind of service. One alternative
would be to build some kind of peer-to-peer replicated solution where
players hold copies of data that they select, as well as some amount of
other user's data, with an overlay scheme used to avoid a centralized
server. I think the sharing of user-rated content is a unique space for
p2p systems, and I don't know if there's a good existing solution there.
Another related idea would be to build a latency-sensitive overlay
network for doing game discovery for multiplayer games. Currently, I
think most internet multiplayer games use a centralized server to do
discovery. Again, this design requires more resources than many
open-source games have available.
I'm not sure if there are good solutions for these problems already, but
if not, I think it would be useful to have a module for doing this
available. I think these projects would be ambitious, but doable, and
might even lead to a nice research paper if a student wanted to go that
direction. I might be able to mentor a student if they wanted to take
on one of these projects.
--Mike