GSOC Lobby Proposal-niadh

My name is Neil Munro (niadh on forums and gna) my personal statement can be found here: http://aedentide.ath.cx/gsoc/wesnoth.txt I selected the Multiplayer server idea that can be found here: http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/SoC_Ideas_Multiplayer_server for my application for gsoc.

What I propose is to study games that already employ a lobby system and determine what makes a good lobby system then I will create a mock interface that might reflect the 'inspired' ideas from other games in Wesnoth. I will then prototype a Python powered demonstrating of how this might work in practice.

One of the things I would like to implement is a means to search for various game types and in fact players. This would hopefully be a dynamic search so that as the user searches for games the ones that do not match the search string are ignored. For example if someone wished to search for a game joe blogs is running the user could type the player name into the search box and any games joe blogs is involved with are shown.

Integration with the friends/block list could be implemented so a user can choose to filter games created by their friend(s), this would make finding games much easier and user friendly. Because the lobby is the users portal to anything they may wish to do in a multiplayer game it has to be easy to use, user friendly and intuitive. It is my opinion users don't want to have to read about where buttons or controls are they should be obvious and easy to find.