I have been working on a multiplayer Flash game, and I was trying to use XML Socket Servers to accomplish the task of throwing the data back and forth. I tried SmartFoxServer, and Palabre, and they both seem to have issues that prevent me from doing it the way I need to, not to mention a lack of support.
I was wondering if I could use Jabber, and more precisely, XIFF, to create this game. Without going into too many details, this is how it works:
-User opens the game in their browser, logs in (if necessary… .preferably anonymous).
-Game loads the ‘‘room variables’’. These are x & y coordinates of objects in the room, that users can drag around simultaneously.
-When a user drags an object and releases, the new coordinates for that object are sent to the other users, and are updated in the ‘‘room variables’’.
This might sound simple, and it should be, but I have not found a server that can accomplish this in a simple way. Can XIFF & Wildfire do it?
Maybe with a heavy imagination coimponent you would be able to tweak the usage of jabber & wildfire to accomplish this… The user management is not a problem, the room ppl list can be accomplished easily with wildfire MUC service… then moving objects ''round could be handled through a broadcast message to the room with a custom XML/HTML like syntax with not too much effort (and the flash clients should need to parse and process the data…)
The major problem I can think of is pushing the user an initial list of object/positions as this is not a fixed message (like the one you can configure a jabber server to push to a client manually) but working out a wildfire plug-in and with some custom database tables you would not have too much a trouble to accomplish something in this line (some basic/medium java skills needed)
Anyway I think you should consider a mixed solution… your flash client sends a request to a web or xmlsocket based service the room info and then you manage all activity in the room through jabber… i’'d say web is the best and easiest solution in this case with some basic php/asp and db driven environment through send&load i.e. You can also build a custom Extension to jabber/Xiff and code a custom IQ interceptor for wildfire to manage custom IQ messages to work all this out.