Another version of JOGRE (Java Online Gaming Real-time Engine) has been released - "alpha 0.2.1". JOGRE (Java Online Gaming Real-time Engine) is an open-source, online, real-time games engine and API programmed entirely in Java. The developers website is http://jogre.sourceforge.net

Using JOGRE is it is easy to create powerful multi-player games which people can join from anywhere in the world. JOGRE is designed to be an open source equivalent to popular gaming websites such as Yahoo! Games and currently includes 5 games - chess, checkers, propinquity, connect4, tic-tac-toe.

The differences between 0.1 and 0.2.1 are as follows:

- Moved away from the multiple server to a single server model which can handle multiple games.
- All communication is now XML as opposed to tokenizing their objects into flat Strings. This removed the need for including length tokens for nested objects which was making communication much too complex.
- Cleaner layered approach for communication between server -> game -> table (each have a many-to-one relationship) using dedicated parser classes at each layer.
- New GUI wrapper for the server which makes it very easy to see the state of the server at any one time. It also shows all incoming / outgoing messages.

There also exists a "Connect 4" tutorial which illustrates how easy it is to make a powerful multi-player game. It is available on the JOGRE site in the "documentation" section.

Any comments are greatly appreciated!!