Hello,
There have never been any publicly available playroom server application.
You perhaps think about the Connect4 I released near 2008-2009.
Since you can play Connect4 on the playroom, this separate Connect4 game has become de facto useless. As such, it is no longer maintained.
It isn't desirable to have such a publicly available server application, for several reasons:
- Fragmentation of the community: on which server are my friends ? How do I speak or play with several people who are in different servers ?
- Cheating and abuses: if everybody has his little server, it's impossible to keep global stats, impossible to make sure nobody is cheating, and impossible to prevent from abuses. We can't rely on server holders to keep everything clean.
- Many people are incapable of running their own server, because they don't know how to do it, or because their network operator don't allow it, and there are a lot of network issues when running a server behind a connection at home; this isn't ideal.
Look at other audiogames that can be played online with decentralized servers and see the problems they have: things like Alice can connect to Bob but Cedric can't; meta-server desynchronization; etc. That's a lot of frustration and time waste...
Keep this in mind: if a community has been able to form around the playroom, and if that community has been able to go much beyond just games, that's because it took place on a centralized server.
Although topspeed, SoundRTS, Crazy Party and many other are excellent games, they can't really form a community that go far beyond the game. Those which worked are centralized, starting with the audiogames.net forum.
I like open source software a lot, but for an online game like the playroom, I really believe that it can't work.
