How would you like a "Gamers Seeking Gamers" system to work?

[Festivus]

Other than the radius (and a lower membercount), it's the same as what we already have here - the vBuleltin search engine searching the member database for profile fields. Not sure how they've done the radius bit, though.

We can definitely drastically improve on that. I get over a couple dozen results when I use EN World's current system to search for "Southampton UK", but zero on PnP's.

What is different is that it's passive. Their website emails me whenever someone signs up within a radius of my address. This way I don't have to constantly search the member database, I just get notified... and it's timely. Someone just entered that they were looking for a game, and all the people running games in the nearby area get notified.

 

[Umbran]

What is different is that it's passive. Their website emails me whenever someone signs up within a radius of my address. This way I don't have to constantly search the member database, I just get notified... and it's timely. Someone just entered that they were looking for a game, and all the people running games in the nearby area get notified.

Well, "signs up" probably isn't the thing you want/need to ping from. You want more like "switches status to, 'looking for a game'". If the site is more driven by profiles, you definitely want "looking for a game" notifications to be distinctly 'opt in'.

 

[Janx]

Would you like to make some money? And make EN World even cooler than it already is?

Well, I like money, and I like ENWorld and I am actually looking for a new job...

A big barrier for me is that my current day job ties up enough of my time that it's hard to commit to a second project and maintain a family life, so I'd be hesitant to volunteer to, so as to not let anybody down.

Though I'd be happy to help out where I can or review some designs.

Here's some techno mumbo jumbo on me, and what I've found in doing this kind of work. Might give a sense of perspective when considering candidates.

I've worked on VB.NET and C# with SQL Server to do web applications and linux with PHP and MySQL for web applications (including having to completely rewrite from one platform to another due to politics). I haven't done anything with vBulletin or external apps (all my work was for internal corporate use, sadly no public portfolio). I do have a a patent on one of the things I made.

In general, I can design the rough DB in about an hour or two, fine tuning it as discussions with the customer reveal more complexity.

It should take less than a day to code up the objects and GUI needed to administrate a table in the DB. That's 1-2 objects per table with admin screens (UI) to make it work. Some are faster than that. The point then is, a basic app* can be worked up from nothing in about 3 months or less, and then fine tuned to make it look pretty and the customer facing screens to be made more robust and user-friendly.

*by basic app, I mean one with 20-50 tables. Smaller stuff, goes faster, especially when you've got existing screens, libraries and frameworks you can use.

I'm a little busy this weekend, but if I have time I'll post some table definitions that would model a User having gaming preferences, that queries could be written to "find who likes what I like and is nearby". It's probably 3-5 tables to do it.

With that, you could compare what others propose, and identify some shortcomings (and skill set differences). Nothing's more dangerous than an incomplete design that makes expanding harder.

 

[Festivus]

Well, "signs up" probably isn't the thing you want/need to ping from. You want more like "switches status to, 'looking for a game'". If the site is more driven by profiles, you definitely want "looking for a game" notifications to be distinctly 'opt in'.

I am pretty sure everything they have there is opt in, and it sends notices when one switches status (signing up is essentially a status switch too). I totally agree, I wouldn't want to be notified of a new LARP forming in my area for example, but I might be interested if a Star Wars game was looking for players.

 

[Morrus]

Well, I like money, and I like ENWorld and I am actually looking for a new job...

A big barrier for me is that my current day job ties up enough of my time that it's hard to commit to a second project and maintain a family life, so I'd be hesitant to volunteer to, so as to not let anybody down.

Though I'd be happy to help out where I can or review some designs.

Here's some techno mumbo jumbo on me, and what I've found in doing this kind of work. Might give a sense of perspective when considering candidates.

I've worked on VB.NET and C# with SQL Server to do web applications and linux with PHP and MySQL for web applications (including having to completely rewrite from one platform to another due to politics). I haven't done anything with vBulletin or external apps (all my work was for internal corporate use, sadly no public portfolio). I do have a a patent on one of the things I made.

In general, I can design the rough DB in about an hour or two, fine tuning it as discussions with the customer reveal more complexity.

It should take less than a day to code up the objects and GUI needed to administrate a table in the DB. That's 1-2 objects per table with admin screens (UI) to make it work. Some are faster than that. The point then is, a basic app* can be worked up from nothing in about 3 months or less, and then fine tuned to make it look pretty and the customer facing screens to be made more robust and user-friendly.

*by basic app, I mean one with 20-50 tables. Smaller stuff, goes faster, especially when you've got existing screens, libraries and frameworks you can use.

I'm a little busy this weekend, but if I have time I'll post some table definitions that would model a User having gaming preferences, that queries could be written to "find who likes what I like and is nearby". It's probably 3-5 tables to do it.

With that, you could compare what others propose, and identify some shortcomings (and skill set differences). Nothing's more dangerous than an incomplete design that makes expanding harder.

The difference between this and a standalone app is that it needs to run within vBulletin 4, interact tightly with vBulletin data and user actions, and use the vBulletin member profiles.

So 90% of it's done for you (save configuration of the data contained within the profile, which is simply a function of setting fields in the admin panel). The part that needs doing is the geographical part.

 

[Asmor]

Well, WoW recently rolled out their new Looking For Dungeon tool and it's completely revitalized the game for me. I think it should be a model for a gamers-seeking-gamers thing here.

Ideally, it should...

...let people specify their preferred roles (e.g. DM, player, rules lawyer, drama queen).
...automatically group people together to ensure an appropriate mix for each group.
...allow people to specify the game they want to play, but provide incentives for being flexible.
...not limit the search to our local dimension but to other parallel dimensions as well.
...automatically transport everyone to the same game table when a group is found.

Get all that working, and I think you'll have yourself a winner.

 

[Morrus]

Well, WoW recently rolled out their new Looking For Dungeon tool and it's completely revitalized the game for me. I think it should be a model for a gamers-seeking-gamers thing here.

Ideally, it should...

...let people specify their preferred roles (e.g. DM, player, rules lawyer, drama queen).
...automatically group people together to ensure an appropriate mix for each group.
...allow people to specify the game they want to play, but provide incentives for being flexible.
...not limit the search to our local dimension but to other parallel dimensions as well.
...automatically transport everyone to the same game table when a group is found.

Get all that working, and I think you'll have yourself a winner.

No free cookies?

 

[Asmor]

No free cookies?

Some things just go without saying.

 

[Kurtomatic]

Regarding lat/longs versus privacy, etc.., the key here is that the kinds of distance calculations we want require lat/longs. Each user will have a lat/long field value by necessity. The real question is, the lat/long of what? Street address, postal code, city, etc...

Your best bets in this regard are probably postal code and IP. Getting the lat/long of ZIPs (technically, the centroid location of each ZIP area) is pretty easy; localizing it properly for international postal codes may be more tricky.

IP addresses have several advantages, particularly regarding collection and privacy. The trick with IP based lat/longs is they are approximations from databases of known locations, and this kind of data is less publicly available. I did some poking around, and most of my googling leads to MaxMind, who offers a free lite version of their GeoIP product: MaxMind - GeoLite City | Free Geolocation Database. There may be other sources of this kind of data. My personal use of IP location services (using my iPod touch and Android phone) give good enough results for the sort of distance calcs we're looking for (usually withing a half-mile or better).

 

[Janx]

The difference between this and a standalone app is that it needs to run within vBulletin 4, interact tightly with vBulletin data and user actions, and use the vBulletin member profiles.

So 90% of it's done for you (save configuration of the data contained within the profile, which is simply a function of setting fields in the admin panel). The part that needs doing is the geographical part.

ah, so vBulletin has some "custom field" capabilities. good to know.

I definitely would have expected to use vBulletin's user definition for profile data (name, address, email). The main thing after that is having fields to store game preferences (and the pick lists for those preferences). Pretty minor to add your own tables to the DB, if vBulletin didn't directly support it.

In any event, the translation of the user's addresss fields (which has to support a number of styles for internationalization is the technical hurdle. I have no doubt there's existing code or web-service calls to somebody like google maps to resolve it. And as one chap pointed out upstream, all you gotta do is truncate digits on the coords to reduce the precision and thus obfuscate the user's exact location.

from there, you probably need a few new screens, one to set your preferences, one to manage the pick lists (the mega list of gaming preferences users choose from), and a few screens to search for and display gamer results.

after that, fancy meeting management, facebook-like features is extra...