Comment by Too | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Too | Hacker News Reader

> The real interesting thing about Battlelog however is a Windows PC specific component. If you are heading to Battlelog from a Windows PC and you own the PC version of Battlefield 3 you can launch into a game right from within the browser. How does this work? It works with the help of a browser plugin that exposes additional functionality to the in browser client. Namely it has a function to start the game and pass it information as well as a general purpose function to ping an IP address which is used for the server browser.

Unreal did that back in 1998. They register the unreal:// protocol in windows so any hyperlinks that contain an address such as unreal://127.0.0.1 will launch the game and connect to that ip. The good thing about this is that it can also be used by third party websites such as promoting your clans server and it is completely browser independent. I don't know if it could be abused to "rickroll-launch" the game but i haven't heard of any such incidents.

Even before "Unreal" you could find the servers, check the ping, see the players' nicks, scores and statistics via browser in both "Quake" (technically: "QuakeWorld") and "Quake 2". The plugin to do that was called "QPlug"/"Q2Plug" and it was co-created by John Carmack himself.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of such solutions (Battlelog included) - mainly because switching between fullscreen game and browser is, in most cases, very jerky (although it has improved since "Unreal" times). Also, the difference between in-game and in-browser UX ruins the flow of the whole thing. Have to admit though that viewing friends, statistics, etc. through a web browser is very convenient.

I was thinking this as well. Why not just register a protocol handler calling out to the battlefield client. Seems much more x-browser. Why wouldn't that work, and why is the browser plug-in real interesting? What am I missing?

You are missing the two way communication that is impossible with URL handlers. A URL handler can only transmit information in one way and cannot do that implicitly. The user has to click on that link.

Same with e.g Call of Duty 4. If you go to Game Monitor and click on a server's IP address, it'll open a link like:

    cod4://212.85.69.40:28960/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com