GGZ Gaming Zone

infobox website

commercial = No
type = Online gaming
registration = Optional
owner = GGZ Gaming Zone community
author = GGZ Gaming Zone developers
url = http://www.ggzgamingzone.org/

GGZ Gaming Zone is a free online gaming infrastructure project founded in the year 2000. Dozens of games (servers, clients and protocols) have been developed, in addition to gaming tools, a chat bot and other utilities.

Overview

GGZ is the Free Software community's answer to advertising-driven community gaming sites like MSN Games, Yahoo! Games, and Pogo.com. Some of the site's features include full internationalization, support for game spectators, and computer players.

Games

As of April 2008, the GGZ website lists support for 38 game engines, including both classic games such as Chess and computer-specific games such as Bomberman. Most of the games are implemented for multiple toolkits and desktops such as KDE, GNOME, SDL and Java.

A partial list follows:

*Chess
*Chinese Checkers
*Chinese Chess
*Combat
*ConnectX
*Connect the Dots
*Escape
*Geekgame
*GGZCards (includes LaPocha, Spades, Hearts, Bridge, FortyTwo and others)
*Hastings
*Keepalive
*Krosswater
*LaPocha (deprecated due to GGZCards)
*Muehle
*Reversi
*Spades (aka NetSpades)
*TicTacToe
*GGZBoard (includes Chess, Checkers, Reversi, Go, Hnefatafl and Ludo)

Independent game projects have started to include GGZ support:

*Batalla Naval
*Kamikaze
*Tenes Empanadas Graciela
*Tuxman
*Widelands
*Freeciv
*Freelords

Infrastructure

erver

"Grubby" is the chat bot developed by the GGZ project. It is a versatile internationalized bot.

The main server is named "ggzd".Server tools are "ggzduedit" to edit user permissions and "ggz-cmd" to send commands and check the server uptime.

Client

Game tournaments can be organized by anyone. Players can stay informed with the "Competition Calendar" application.

To enter a game room, the classic way of using a "Core Client" can be chosen. Alternatively, login is possible with a special application named "GGZap", as well as from chat clients such as Gaim.

Web interface

A "rankings page" has been developed which has since turned into the GGZ Community portal. It allows players to log in, watch their scores and past results, as well as their collection of awards, define their geographical position on a map, review played games, and talk to each other in the forums.

imilar projects

There are several free projects not related to GGZ, but with (at least partially) similar goals.

*Arianne
*WorldForge

Since June 2006, a lot of former MSN Games users have migrated to the GGZ servers, so that casual games have moved more into the focus of the project.

External links

* [http://www.ggzgamingzone.org/ Project website]