hughes@ah.com wrote some interesting stuff:

Duplicate games won't work

Damn! People are paying attention. It was an off-hand remark. Any bells and whistles along those lines are certainly banned from any early version.

There is a non-crypto issue of how one finds playing partners without a central server.

My mind wandered to that very point this very morning. The simplist way to find players is the same we currently find email addresses: the hard way. Type in the addresses of the other players. (Assuming the software is already running on those nodes, those players would not have to retype the other addresses, accepting the invitation to play would be more like a single "click".) I think anything more elaborate along these lines is a candidate for banning from 1.0. (One problem is that the "I'm looking for a game."-problem is at least as big and interesting as building a deck of cards.)

I would strongly suggest the separation of the communications, user presentation, and decision parts of the client software.

And that is one of the wonderful sort of engineering problems I love: keeping the different parts clear of each other's private parts yet still considerate of their desires and needs.

client software

My instinct is for a peer-to-peer design. Yes, they will serve each other cards, etc., but I would like to avoid the user confusion of having two different sorts of software needed. (At a comms protocol level there might always be a single server per game--I don't know yet--but I would like to hide that sort of stuff from users.) -kb, the Kent who will be driving to Pasadena early in the morning, but not to watch soccer. -- Kent Borg +1 (617) 776-6899 kentborg@world.std.com kentborg@aol.com Proud to claim 35:00 hours of TV viewing so far in 1994!