Master server alert

It would help with the problem of nobody ever getting on at the some time, if there was a little alert program that ran quietly in the background until someone started playing bitfighter, at which point it would make a sound and bring up a pop up saying "so and so has joined bitfighter" or something like that.

[watusimoto]

The info is all there -- you can write a notifier that reads the JSON feed that runs the status widgets on the home page. The code for that can be downloaded somehow.

You lost me at JSON sorry.

[bobdaduck]

http://bitfighter.org/bitfighterStatus.json

[watusimoto]

It's basically a data format, and when you download the file at the link posted by Bobdaduck, you will get an up-to-the-second (well maybe 30 seconds) status report of what is going on at the Bitfighter master server.

There are many bits of code out there for parsing JSON, and if you are writing in Javascript, parsing is trivial even without a library.

So it should in principle be very easy for someone (i.e. not me) to write a widget that checks the master server every 20 seconds and displays an alert when someone joins a game, or some other criteria is satisfied.

Yea, but who?

[watusimoto]

You may have identified why we don't yet have an alert widget!