I was thinking today that it might be a good feature to be able to send and receive IM while in a fullscreen game, especially multiplayer. Some uses: - Chatting with friends who aren''t in the game - Ask a friend to come join you... then he starts his client and you IM him with a link to the world so he can join it. MSN''s protocol is easy to get hold of. I still need to search more to get hold of AOL and Yahoo. ICQ says it is multi-protocol, so I wonder if it''s users could be talked to via the other protocols. What do you think? Anyone tried something like this? Would this be a useful feature for a game engine? -solo (my site)

I worked on something like this in the past, but didn't integrate with any of the large IM protocols. It's quite useful.

The game Everquest has an Instant Messenger that works in or out of game. You might check that one out, although it requires you to have an EQ account. It is extremely useful in MMOs for organizing guild/player association activities while some members are in game, and others are at work

[edited by - fingh on June 27, 2003 4:52:27 PM]

Sonork might be what you''re looking for.

Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

The AIM protocol is OSCAR. If you''re writing one that isn''t meant to go outside of your game, write your own.. all the other protocols have too much extra crap that isn''t needed.. it isn''t very hard to write your own..

I saw OSCAR and was wondering if that was something broader than just AIM.

Yeah, I would just take a subset of the message types and discard the rest, only implementing a bare bones portion of each.

I realize the benefit of using your own is simplicity, control, and efficiency. Probably other benefits as well.

But the benefit of using popular protocols is that they work with a lot of systems, including PDA and wireless. Also, people using them often are on friends'' lists who can see when they are online and a status. So just being connected with an in-game status helps a little with marketting. When friends ask what the player is doing, they might get invited to join in with the fun.

So it seems worth a try.

-solo (my site)

don''t exactly recal where I found them, but they''re out there and I''ll see if I can scrounge them up. One thing I remember is that AOL''s protocols are based on ICQ''s protocols, and its actually possible to cross-message between the AOL and ICQ services. Be back later hopefully with a link, but now I gotta run.


Ravyne, NYN Interactive Entertainment
HTTP://nyn.studio42games.com

In the case of actually interfacing with the AIM servers, i'd be rather wary. OSCAR itself is not a public domain protocol (while you can still find some information on it), and AOL may not like you using their servers (of course Trillian can get away with it.. *shrug*). TOC was simpler, and public domain i believe, but I'm pretty sure AOL has put it out of commision.

EDIT: Hehe, forgot to mention that you can still telnet to toc.oscar.aol.com .. i assume that means that it is still supported... but i don't know for how long.

[edited by - falkone on July 1, 2003 9:29:05 PM]

MSN - http://www.hypothetic.org/docs/msn/index.php
Yahoo! - http://libyahoo2.sourceforge.net/
ICQ(AIM) - http://www.stud.unikarlsruhe.de/~uck4/ICQ/index_gen.html
General - http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mikechen/im/

AOL specific info is a bitt harder to find than a google search unfortunately...but as I said, its based on the ICQ protocols.

Ravyne, NYN Interactive Entertainment
HTTP://nyn.studio42games.com

Find the Miranda IM system on Sourceforge. They have plugins for loads of protocols and most if not all of them are open source.

Great advice, thanks!!

-solo (my site)