[pygame] a gsoc idea: networking

[Michael George <mdgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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