[Hedda]

@garbear, while you dream big and are almost willing to give us the whole world anyway, can I suggest that under "Future Components" also add these additional components?


Game Store for games ROMs
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=173355
Provide a centralized Game Store for games ROMs inside Kodi to enable easy access to downloading of ROMs as digital content directly from inside the 10-foot GUI. To make games ROM downloadable from Kodi as easy as addons you probably need a new type of addons that can provide access to different digital distributions and content delivery networks. So when and if RetroPlayer finally makes it into Kodi mainline source code tree, the next thing it would really nice to have an Python Script or Plugin Addon in Kodi with a nice integrated GUI as part of RetroPlayer or a general Games Manager Library, with an content delivery interface called "ROM Store" or something similar, that content delivery interface would work like Kodi's existing Addon Manager, being a digital distribution platform with repositories and browsing of available addons, but instead of offering normal addons those plugins or scripts would instead only allow you browse game ROMs. Adding a on-demand digital distribution platform for downloading ROMs to RetroPlayer in Kodi, and at least have some legal ROM site repos added by default to that, and the users themselves could add links additional repos for sites that contain other ROMs. Kind of like how content delivery platform interfaces like how Cydia works on jailbroken iOS devices.

Shared online persistent gamer database server (for persistent datastore of game data)
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=201868
To extend on the network-play idea but different concept from simple peer-to-peer networked multi-player capabilities, as here the XBMC Foundation or Team Kodi would provide a gamer server that hosts a shared online database (and datastore) to enable the persistent saving of gamer player profiles ("gamer cards"), save player rankings, and high scores in one online location that can be seen across the Kodi gamer community if users choose to opt-in, create user account to login and upload such gamer data. RakNet ( https://github.com/OculusVR/RakNet ) can provide among other things provide a "Lobby Server" http://www.raknet.net/raknet/manual/lobby.html that is a system which provides a database powered lobby with support for friends, rooms, quick match, ranking, messaging, and multiple titles. This shared online persistent gamer database could act similar to similar to commercial arcade video game network communication systems like SEGA's ALL.Net (Amusement Linkage Live Network) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALL.Net and Taito's NESiCAxLive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NESiCAxLive


PS: Bump with reminder for garbear to update the original post in this thread with this new Github organization link from here:

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=220070

Perhaps also need a general update to the other parts describing the scope of this project and its subprojects too, and how RetroPlayer is suppose to fit inside Kodi?

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=195552

little update on how retroplayer fits in with XBMC:



this is the current layout of the retroplayer project. it is centered around two APIs, the Game API (connects retroplayer to game clients) and the Hardware API (connects game clients to input). the Hardware API moves all of the joystick code out of XBMC and into binary add-ons. i have also started working on support for the Retrode and retrode-like devices through the media reader sub-API.

you'll notice the only functional difference is that RetroPlayer is no longer connected to any input. I've re-written the joystick API two or three times, and the end result was never satisfactory because I couldn't separate the input from retroplayer. now, with input gone, the complexity of retroplayer is greatly reduced, leading to more maintainable code.

putting as much code as possible behind APIs is generally a good strategy. i learned this rather late in the development of retroplayer, so there are still quite a few parts that are entangled. however, looking at this diagram, i think i'm on the right track - components are finally only communicating with their API, and not with other components