Gamespy

#1 Paul,
To make your game work with gamespy, you need to license their software and integrate it into the engine. You can learn more about this here.
Although it is my personal opinion that if you are working with Torque you should not try and use another networking engine such as gamespy's but instead build your game around Torque's network code. I have played and tinkered with it in the past and have also looked into tearing Torque's network code out just to play with other network engine in Torque and after much thought it would require too much work to unravel it from the game as well as you would lose one of the best parts of the engine. The networking engine in Torque is one of the best if not still the best in the industry and although Gamespy, may in turn generate a large user base because of it's portal and services it's not worth the money nor the effort.

--Bryan
Edit: Fixed URL linking

#2 In general, I'd only suggest GameSpy if you have the budget to burn on licensing and integration costs.

And even then... You're probably much better off rolling your own community system like Lore, Orbz, and Think Tanks have done. GameSpy likes to charge for their services.

#3 I'm not using TGE at all, though I hear there networking code is supposed to be top-notch. However, stripping out just that portion and making it stand-alone is millions of miles beyond my understanding threshold.

Last time I looked at networking code myself it was using I/SPX for a dos game called bedlam. Whilst I can get the code together once I know what I'm doing, I'm just not as experienced in the design of this as I need to be.

I certainly don't want a full blown client-server model with keep alives like you'd find at the nearest quake server. Well, I could use it I guess but I've got no hosting and no time to develop it. :S

It's just mini-golf. I was thinking of "host" and "join" buttons and the join expects an IP address of the host. When they meet up it becomes pier<->pier. Is this too low-rent these days ?

#4 Paul,

I'm not sure on it's status or if it would be overkill for mini-golf, but GG announced they were working on a standalone version of the net code, called the Torque Network Library. There's also a little more info @ Mark F's .plan, around the same time.

I'd imagine Ben might be able to shed a little more light than I could. :-)

-Eric

#5 Hi Eric :)

That's something that would go down very well. I'd even be prepared to pay for it, as it will save me a lot of time.

Ben ?

#6 Wow, its been a loooong time since I've played Bedlam.

#7 Wow too. Nice to see at least one satisfied customer :D

#8 TNL sounds like it could meet your needs nicely. I suggest you mail Mark and ask him about it - he can probably tell you something more reliable than I can. :)

#9 Gamespy will do two things.

#1 Charge you an arm and a leg
#2 Chase your users away due to loads of spam

#10 There are other products like www.xfire.com, that don't have any of the requirements that gamespy has.