STEAM?

[jitspoe]

sendhope / sprout came to me with a suggestion to implement something like STEAM for paintball.  I've personally never used STEAM, but he says there's a feature that scans the servers for friends online and notifies you when they're playing and on what server.

What would the rest of you think of a little program you could keep running in the background to notify you when certain people were playing?  We'd probably have to write our own program, but it might also be possible to support STEAM itself.

[Excalibur]

that sounds like a cool thing. funny when i first read the topic steam i was thinking he is adding steam (hot water steam) to paintall now both would be cool to have. maybe even like water that moves with like the wind or somthing. im just thinking about stuff that would be cool to have in like 1-2 years

[meat]

I use steam....its full of a lot of it too, its nothing super, but the idea is great.  In order for you to use steam this would have to be run on the Half Life engine (probably ruling out the use of it).  What valve did with steam is to incorporate 'steam' into all aspects of the game, it runs the console, server browser, IM feature, auto updating, and mod list for execution.  They also made it so everone has to log into steam so they can track and ban cheaters etc, much like they do with warcraft 3, and diablo 2.  The whole thing is based around what they call "content servers" which are basically big ftp servers that host out all that info, the patches, the mods them selves, and anything associated with half life and the mods.  The idea is good, but when they send a patch out, you go to log in at the same time everyone else does, so its slow and kind of clunky as im writing this.  Their site is www.steampowered.com if you want to read some more info for it.

[jitspoe]

Yeah, I looked at it and figured it was only for HL stuff.  They wouldn't really have anything to gain by supporting our game anyway.

Aside from the time aspect, it's easily doable.  Maybe Calrathan can work on it.

[meat]

yeah, most of the features wouldnt do so well, but if you had the ambition and the servers, and made your own 'steam' it could be neat.

[meat]

i thought of something else, i noticed that some of the other threads pertain to global stats, this might be the oportunity to pull all of that into something bigger, one feature being those stats.   I know very little about programing, so i have no idea how the logistics would be to do something like this, but if you can find a way to do this, all the more power to ya.

[tomvendetta]

In the matter of finding friends, All Seeing Eye lets you look what players are in a server, maybe the steam type client would be able to scan ase and find if your friends are on...

*Edit*
I think for this to work we would have to all sign up for beam (im calling it beam so i dont have to say steam and get you confused) and then beam would asign us guids, this would also be a good thing because say person1 is cheating but goes on person3's name then we dont have to worry about person3 getting banned, because we would have to ban person1s guid... make sense?