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Games Come to Pidgin
Tovok7 writes "Free software instant messengers have long been lacking the support to play games with your friends. The waiting is finally over, because today Pidgin Games was released. It comes as plugins for the popular Instant Messenger Pidgin and is running under Linux and Windows. The special thing about Pidgin Games is that it is written in the new programming language Vala which has a C# like syntax, but compiles to pure C."
It's a plugin, not a core component.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
Why have I never seen Vala featured on Slashdot before? If anything, the language intrigues me, and seems to be a nice way to get OO GTK going on without silly C hacks or writing it in Perl/Python.
When on earth did this happen?
- oZ
// i am here.
"It comes as plugins for the popular Instant Messenger Pidgin and is running under Linux and Windows."
Generally things that have to be added on separately cant be counted as "bloat". It's just not the nature.
I thought they just spent all their time removing features for new releases these days.
I don't understand how years and years back, Gaim had rudimentary support for voice and video (the most requested feature) and tons of other features. In the past 3-4 years of development, voice and video was never finished and is no longer an option to even compile in I do believe. And instead of new features, I keep seeing more and more features removed to streamline the app.
I'm not sure it has moved forward in years.
I'm waiting for kopete on Windows.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I use Pidgin. No one I chat with does.
For simple instant messenger games, wouldn't a virtual machine suffice? I'd just find it easier to trust a game someone's happened to write for this if it presented far less risk to my system.
... and even better, it's unaffiliated with the Pidgin project, so the Pidgin devs didn't lose their minds.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Where is the Audio and Video?!
(Formerly FunPidgin) Forked after the resize box debacle. http://funpidgin.sourceforge.net/
No sig, sorry.
Look, I know it's open-source and they're doing it for free and yadda yadda yadda.
But try making a functional prog before adding more plugins we don't care about!
And meanwhile, Custom Emoticons support is still stalled :(
oh yeah? well anytime i feel bloated, it's always thanks to something i've added.
oh, their minds have been lost for some time now. Just not on this issue. I love how they can spend time pissing off users over the insert text size mod, and how they waste Google Summer of Code on projects like Myspace integration and finch, but still can't implement jingle properly.
Myspace integration may be a waste, but there's nothing wasted about Finch. I've used it, and needed to use it, a few times and it was a life saver. It uses a console and you don't. Leave it at that.
Oh, you must mean Finch. But could someone port, say, a tetromino game to run on top of Finch?
I know it's not the same as how it used to be, but now (as of at least 2.4.2) you can set a minimum number of lines for the text box. If you go over that number of lines, the box grows.
Thank God. I'm thinking of writing a plugin that disables emoticons completely. I'll name it something like vulcanIM. For emoticons... are not logical.
Implementing a jingle is easy, just play it over and over until it is stuck in the subjects' heads.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
This is already done. Set your emoticon image set to 'None'.
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
The MSN plugin is notoriously broken too, and not only because they haven't implemented MSNP14 yet; i'm not talking about camera support nor similar bullshit, but to be able to have a chat without messages bouncing with error or being disconnected altogether - i submited that bug myself, but a quick search will reveal a lot of people with similar issues. I hear the MSN developers were frustrated with the project in the sense that some requirements or patches were met with indiference or ignored altogheter.
It's a crying shame, because ever since 2.2.0, Pidgin is (otherwise) a fantastic IM client. The UI has been polished to a shine, and the program itself works faster and with a lesser footprint than previous versions. There's a lot of very nice plugins, and some nice work in progress too. I don't mind about games, but i agree - i'd rather have better IM support any time sooner.
Most if not all internet based games have a layer of chat behind it, is almost a plugin. That a chat program have could games as plugin is something potentially good. Connecting people is the 1st step, maximizing what they can do together is the 2nd one, and games fits perfectly there.
The next steps is to have an standard for implementing those games in more chat clients/platforms, and of course, adding good multiuser games.
Nice :[
You were downloading stuff and blame Pidgin for your issues? Stop whining or stop downloading porn. Your choice.
Which is funny, since both the official MSN client and aMSN work flawlessly under the same conditions. It was implied, but i'm pointing it out right now.
I thought I'd have a look, but no it wouldn't install go figure.
Yep, add to that jabber thread support and a few others. IMO, they probably use dice to decide if they allocate resources to a specific bug or feature.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I've got a very wierd slightly pidgin-related problem.
It all stems from the fact that I have the EXACT same email address for my msn account (not hotmail, a bt email address registered with microsoft's passport) as for my yahoo account (yahoo im accounts aren't normally email addresses, but bt did a deal with yahoo for them to handle their email, and everyone got their @bt email address as a yahoo account).
This would be fine, except that all messages that get sent via yahoo end up going to my msn account, even if I'm signed in to yahoo at the time. Even better, pidgin doesn't seem to receive yahoo->msn crossover IMs, so even though I'm signed into yahoo, and pidgin's idea of signed into msn, I don't receive any yahoo IMs until I sign into the official msn client.
Wierd huh?
- Implement video for XMPP/Jabber/Google Talk with Jingle and RTP (XEP-0180)
Yes, the Pidgin devs make some decisions that the users don't like, but if they are really as bad as people claim then anybody who thinks he/she can do better should fork it. Unless I'm seriously mistaken pidgin, finch and libpurple are released under the GPL and not the evil Vista License(tm).
Before I go on: I use pidgin for all my chatting activities, and it is an invaluable tool for me.
That said one has to wonder why Pidgin takes longer to startup than does OpenOffice Writer...
Luckily though, I only start it once a week, the day after booting into Windows for lan games.
To hell with jingle, I'd just like to see Pidgin handle XMPP properly... It seems to be one of the most-lacking clients that claims to support XMPP, and, at least for coworkers, consistently crashed every single time they tried to join a MUC on our internal server. I could never figure out service discovery with it either (I actually didn' KNOW about service discovery, despite years of using gaim/pidgin with XMPP).
Since then, I've switch to one of: psi, kopete, gajim (I've used them all, each has particular strengths)
I've also played a bit with the whiteboard-over-XMPP feature in Inkscape, after discovering tha Coccinella doesn't, and apparently never will, support logging into multiple separate accounts at once, which is a necessity at work, as I have both an internal and an external account.
All of them have significantly better support for XMPP, and by running the AIM/YIM/MSN/ICQ transports on my home XMPP server, I have the best of all worlds (including being able to be signed in from multiple locations at once).
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
As you humorously point out, C++ started simply as C with Classes and was a pre-processor which convert a C language with extension for classes, onto pure C.
So yes, Vala is only the circle coming back to its starting point. (in a way which almost reminds the wheel of reincarnation)
But the subtle reasons that makes that Vala matters today, is that C++ has since long become a language of it own, which is not any more simply pre-processed into C, but compiled on its own.
C has still a couple of advantage in some specific situations (is simpler to compiler ; even more hardware has C compilers thatn C++ and/or Java ; etc.)
So a C-based GObject system has some peculiar advantages over the objects found in C++ or Java, which makes it useful in a select number of situation.
Except that, due to its heavy reliance on macro preprocessor hacks, C programs using GObjet are ass-ugly, and trying to creates one's own GObject class is headache-inducing.
Vala comes as a nice preprocessor which gives some simple syntax, yet still produce C at the output, something that C has stopped doing for some time.
And the good thing it that, down hill, that C GObjet can have bindings automatically generated for a really big number of languages. Which is not the case with C# against which Vala is directly competing.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...that cause it downhill to create a world in which a furious community is playing networked multi-player nethack from their Finch IM, while the rest are trying to get eaten by a grue.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yeah, maybe someone should look into forking...
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
Was I the only one who read the title and first thought it meant a game was being made in a pidgin language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin)?
Then I woke up and realized, no, this is slashdot, 10% really interesting news stories, 90% linux gibberish (to me personally, not trying to flamebait here).
btw the unofficial msn-pecan plugin is much better, messages still bounce with an error from time to time but they nearly always go through with just one retry (unlike the standard pidgin msn plugin where you often had to close and reopen the window to make your message go through).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register