I realized yesterday morning that I had been developing this multi-user game engine the wrong way, which I kinda felt from the beginning, by using the IM system of communication as opposed to the conference room system.  The new switch over to the conference room system is perfect for what I needed, but be forewarned, what a pain in the ass it was to get a conference room up and running.

What I didn’t realize is that there are quite a few properties needing to be set when creating or
joining a conference room:

room = new Room(kernel.connection);

room.setRoomJID(
  "myroomname@conference." + 
  kernel.connection.server +
  "/Game%201");

room.roomName = Kernel.formatIncomingName(
  kernel.connection.getBareJID());

room.nickname ="Game 1";

room.conferenceServer = "conference." +
  kernel.connection.server;

room.enableAutoUpdate();
addRoomListeners();
room.join();


You need to set the room’s JID, roomName, nickname, and conference server.  The other thing to note is that the conference server seems to need the conference. at the beginning of the URL, it seems to not work at all without it.  The JID needs to be formatted as such as well:

{roomName}@{conferenceServer}/{nickname}

Without these set properly it will not even attempt to create a conference room.  Once this was done the rest was a breeze.  I’ve created the ability to search for all available games, create a game, join a game, leave a game, end a game, display all game players, message all game players, and for the user who created the game to be able to move a box that then refreshes its location on each of the other players screens.

The known errors in my code are exceptions that occur when a connection times out and that the app does not reset itself when a disconnection occurs, a game is left, or a game is ended.

As usual the latest code can be downloaded from:

git clone git://github.com/mbrio/xiff-game.git
git checkout post-three

So I’ve decided that I’d start posting some open source code and screencasts as I do some development in light of all the trouble I had trying to get my apps up and running with a lack of tutorials.

To download the source code you will need git:

git clone git://github.com/mbrio/xiff-game.git
git checkout post-one

I’ve tagged my source code specifically for use with this post, as I continue my updates to the code base you’ll still be able to get the source code at the point of this post via tag post-one; I’ve added a screencast to demonstrate what this version of the application is capable of as well.

The Safari window on the right houses the Flex 3 Jabber client logged in as user theanyx; while the left contains the two iChat buddy lists, one for user mbrio and one for user thembrio, as well as the chat window.

You will see that iChat has combined the received messages into one window, I’m not totally happy with this as it is not clear that the single iChat window is receiving messages for both mbrio and thembrio, you will only notice a grey message stating which user is currently active.

Another note to keep in mind is that this application is able to send and receive messages from multiple buddies through a tabbed display. The code is clearly not cleaned up in anyway and is meant only for my own technical advancement, though it may be a little clearer then looking at some of the larger XIFF applications.

The XIFF API I’m using can be downloaded from Ignite Realtime.