Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Online Game Scheduler

As an exercise in seeing if I could do it, I decided to write a web server several months ago. HTTP seems pretty straight forward in principle, but programming it can get bogged down if you accidentally send too many CR's and/or LF's. Also, closing connections is a problem, since clients like IE and FF often don't bother.

However, it now seems to be working, and I can officially announce what I think is a website with an original idea!

I've called it NewGame, and it's an "online game scheduling service". Basically, users select which online games they play. Then, when one user schedules an online game, all the other users who have selected that game will automatically receive an email telling them to date, time, and server.

I thought of this because a common problem with online games, especially new ones and the less well known ones, is that they are often bare of human players. Online games are brought alive by other players being there at the same time, and hopefully my solution will help this to occur.

As well as that, in order to give the site more content, it also has the latest gaming news headlines courtesy of a randomly selected news site. There are also forums for each game, and in a nod to free games, they are highlighted as such, so players can download and play them straight away. And finally, it's going to be the platform for my latest foray into bringing applets back from the brink of extinction!

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