Re: How referees should respond to illegal plays

On May 1, 2005, at 6:05 PM, Doug Orleans wrote:

> It's an "application-level error" which is what the Jabber-RPC spec 
> says
> that RPC faults are for.  But maybe you want to distinguish between
> "Volity error" and "game error".  (But is anything a Volity error?)

As far as RPC goes, I'm thinking things like entirely unrecognized or 
malformed requests, versus valid requests that the actual game doesn't 
agree with.

> I think they could cause all sorts of trouble, since they can come at
> any time,

I'm not so sure that's true. They'd only come as a reaction to player 
input, and in this way be just like the requests that the referee makes 
back to the player when the player succeeds in performing an action. 
e.g. the player sends "play_card()", and the referee sends 
"player_played_card(player, card)" to all the players if it succeeds, 
or "cant_play_card(card)" to the player if it fails. (The Eights server 
currently supports all but this latter.)

> And what would you return as the response to the original request,
> anyway?  Or is everything just "void" now?

It'd just return truth, to acknowledge that the request was received. 
Much like the invitation protocol works, really.

> I guess by "our own error structure" I meant that each game author
> would define that game's error structures that would be returned by
> each request, although it might be useful to define some common
> structures (and provide them in a common ECMAScript library, along
> with other common widgets).

Ah, I see what you're saying now.

--
   Jason McIntosh             jmac <at> jmac.org
Somerville, MA, USA       http://www.jmac.org

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