Some general out of left field networking ideas

[LibretroAdmin]

@cthulhu-throwaway Given all the amazing improvements you've made to the networking code, I've been brainstorming some more ideas that could help the user experience on RetroArch that still have to do with networking code -

• Some way to 'scrape' Libretro articles or certain thumbnails from our website, along with some header text and short descriptions. The user interface code would have to be written by somebody other than you (i.e. me and others), but you'd have to figure out the details of how we'd fetch this data from the network in a mostly secure manner so that it can then be presented.

The aim here would be to make the menu more of a 'live' place, like the Nintendo Switch homescreen where certain 'news' items appear onscreen. This way, the project can share new developments about RetroArch and cores to the user from within RetroArch.

• Following up on that idea, if the user would click on any of these menu elements, we could then open an associated webbrowser taking them to the linked URL. Again, this code doesn't have to be written by you (the user interaction parts), as long as the networking code facilitates being able to fetch this kind of data.

This just serves as a RFC. By no means am I imploring you to drop whatever you are doing and focus on this, of course not. I'd very much prefer for you to continue working on the things that interest you. Just stating some general things of interest and ideas I had and just wanted to query where you stand on this.

[ghost]

My focus is netplay and that alone is a lot of work by itself.

The network side of this implementation should be easy enough.
Implementing a HTML and CSS engine would be too much work; querying the server for news in JSON and then rendering it with what RetroArch already has should be simpler.

Example:

1. Do a HTTP GET on http://example.com/news?count=10
2. example.com sends the latest 10 news article in a JSON format.

[
  {
    "title": "Some title here",
    "images": [
      "image 1 url",
      "image 2 url"
    ],
    "text": "Some text here"
  },
  ...
]

[LibretroAdmin]

Some kind of way to deal with JSON data is probably indeed the way to go. Would just have to see how the current Wordpress-based libretro.com could be changed to deal with that.

[ghost]

And by the way, not sure if you are aware, but the current implementation for the relay servers is universal enough that you can use it for tasks other than netplay.

One good usage outside of netplay is syncing data between two installations across the internet, where cgnats and firewalls might block proper communication.