A parlor "ruleset.html" class=wikipagelink>ruleset. This might be Chess, Backgammon, Rock, Paper, Scissors, or anything else that someone has turned into a Volity game. It doesn't play the game itself, but instead manages several tables, each with its own, autonomous referee.
Anyone can run a parlor! That's part of what makes the Volity idea so cool, after all; it's an entirely open game network.
Running a parlor entails obtaining and then running a parlor program, such as Frivolity. Generally, a parlor often ships as more of a framework than a single, self-running game, and you have to plug a separate game module into it before it will run.
Every parlor needs its own Jabber ID, just like every other entity on the global Jabber network. It should also be registered with the Volity network's bookkeeper, if you want game records to work. Unfortunately, until the VolityNet website is up and running, there's no real way to do this yourself. If you do happen to have a functional parlor you'd like to add to the network, for now, contact Jmac.
The test parlors offer live examples that you can try with any working client program.
Frameworks that implement a referee (in [developer download page.]
If you want to create a Volity game, you do not have to implement the entire referee from scratch. Download one of these frameworks, and then extend the base Game class to implement your game logic.
A client calls this on a parlor when the player wishes to start a new, empty conference for that game. If the server can start a new table, it should respond to this call by creating a referee, which will start, join, and configure a new MUC.
Implementation note: Remember that the parlor that created the referee needs to send back the response with the table's JID, not the referee that created the table.
The parlor may also respond to various admin RPC requests.
parlors should respond to disco info and items requests as follows.
The parlor's identity should have category "volity" and type "parlor". The name field will hold a brief title of the game parlor, suitable for display as a window title or icon label.
More machine-readable information (useful to systems like the UI finder) is available through the attached JEP-0128 form:
parlor
.
Should we define a FORM_TYPE for this?
Note that some elements (ruleset
, ruleset-version
, description
, website
) are representative of the game or its ruleset. Others (contact-jid
and contact-email
) represent the entity which hosts the parlor.
The parlor responds to disco#items queries under the following nodes: