Play By Email

You know what would be cool? A PBEM client type for Volity.

There would be one piece of client software, which would be an email client and a jabber client. It would be able to load PBEM UI files -- these would be small pieces of code which could take the game state (as received from the referee), format an email message to represent it, receive an email reply, and parse the move out.

(This doesn't have to be JS code. Perl or Python would be easier on everybody's nerves.)

Issue: authenticating the player over email. There may be a JEP which deals with this. Alternatively, you could entrust your Jabber password to the gateway. (If we run the gateway on volity.net, this is no big deal. We can validate the email any way we please, for volity.net addresses.)

Alternatively, have people play with a JID of real%address.com@pbem.volity.net. This loses the ability to share games and game history with your real address, but it's easy.

• This does bring up the idea of having players be a Volity construct made up of one or more JIDs. In the past I could never think of a reason for this but this here's a good one. The real problem with that idea is how one would merge gamerecords when adding a JID that's played games to another Volity player account. -- Andy Turner