Idea - RHP ScreenSaver

How about if us paid up members got an RHP screensaver, which cycled through pictures of the board state in our active games? Wouldn't that be nice!

Originally posted by iamatiger
How about if us paid up members got an RHP screensaver, which cycled through pictures of the board state in our active games? Wouldn't that be nice!

great idea except that would be kinda hard right?

tlai1992

Originally posted by tlai1992
great idea except that would be kinda hard right?

[b]tlai1992[/b]

Not that hard:

The RHP screensaver program, when launched, would connect to the RHP server and request images of all current games and download them locally. Then, the screensaver program would would proceed to display each one as a slideshow

-Ray.

Originally posted by rgoudie
Not that hard:

The RHP screensaver program, when launched, would connect to the RHP server and request images of all current games and download them locally. Then, the screensaver program would would proceed to display each one as a slideshow

-Ray.

if it isn't hard to do and doesn't take up too much disk or memory space then i think it'll be a great idea!😀

tlai1992

Originally posted by rgoudie
Not that hard:

The RHP screensaver program, when launched, would connect to the RHP server and request images of all current games and download them locally. Then, the screensaver program would would proceed to display each one as a slideshow

-Ray.

That would put un-necissary strain on the servers, the site would grind to a hault.

Originally posted by rgoudie
Not that hard:

The RHP screensaver program, when launched, would connect to the RHP server and request images of all current games and download them locally. Then, the screensaver program would would proceed to display each one as a slideshow

-Ray.

I thought maybe, that when we moved in each of our games, the new board state could be stored in a cookie or something on our computer. When the RHP screensaver wakes up it looks in the cookie folder and displays any board states it finds that are reasonably current.

This means its not quite the current state - if your op has moved since the last time you looked at the game on RHP then the screensaver won't know about that - and if you have moved computers you are also a bit scuppered

Howeve the idea is that it would use fairly minimal extra bandwidth (because the client computers already know the board state, I think... although do they know it after your last move....?) and it could reuse the board editor functionality to display the images so I think it might be quite doable. Perhaps Russ could comment.

Originally posted by iamatiger
I thought maybe, that when we moved in each of our games, the new board state could be stored in a cookie or something on our computer. When the RHP screensaver wakes up it looks in the cookie folder and displays any board states it finds that are reasonably current.

This means its not quite the current state - if your op has moved since the last time y ...[text shortened]... tionality to display the images so I think it might be quite doable. Perhaps Russ could comment.

Alright, fine. 😉

Yes, a more economical idea would be to have the screensaver program obtain the FENs for all current games and it would create the images itself.

-Ray.

Man, that would be messed up, and Neat!

P-

Originally posted by iamatiger
... stored in a cookie ... When the RHP screensaver wakes up it looks in the cookie folder

That would be interesting, but one factor militating against that exact scenario is that this site is very browser-independent. That's a GOOD thing as it makes it easy for everyone to use their own preferences for hardware and software. Cookies are a W3C standard, but their implementation is not, i.e., cookies are stored very differently by different browsers on different OSs. MS Internet Exploder does store its cookies as files, but most other browsers that I know about do not. Furthermore, most browsers (and all good ones) do not allow you to save arbitrary files other than as downloads.

The result is that (even assuming that the screensaver is for MS Windows only) this implementation is not terribly portable or robust. Several other people have suggested that the screensaver contact the RHP servers to obtain FENs, which could be arranged, but it would certainly involve both additional network traffic an, more importantly, additional load on the RHP servers. I'm not (yet) convinced that this would be a good thing, but Russ would have a better idea of how much additional load would be tolerable. My guess is that the network traffic would not be a problem, in fact, it would be less than we use when we refresh just to see if we have any games waiting. 🙂 I'm not sure that querying the server in a screensaver is a good idea though.

It might be interesting to analyze. IMHO, the worst problem with that is that screensavers generally run when nobody is watching them so having your screensaver tell you that you have moves to make is probably not the optimum use of RHP's servers.

Best Regards,
Paul

How about a screensaver that would play out some preset game but has the option for PGN to be pasted into the preferences, I am sure I could come up with something like this.

how would it work for those crazy players who play around 400 concurrent games it would flood there pc with cookies and slow down there computer

Originally posted by eyeqpc
How about a screensaver that would play out some preset game but has the option for PGN to be pasted into the preferences, I am sure I could come up with something like this.

Do it - And I'll take what is mine
I am the clansman

Feivel

Originally posted by Feivel
Do it - And I'll take what is mine
I am the clansman

Feivel

Yeah - make the chess set that nice ebony and crystal glass one that's my bacground pic at the moment 🙂)))

WOW, I like the idea of a RHP-screensaver.
It could be somting that has nothing to do with MyGames.
But if it has: even better 😀 !
There could be an option in the screensaver: download once a day all my games as pgns or I could paste (from my mails) the pgn into it or...
I am curious, what comes!
th

Originally posted by prn
... that this site is very browser-independent. ...

I like the site very much, I don't have many experiences with testing a site under many different browsers, but is it really "very browser-independent"? I think Russ does not test the site under Linux, so...
th