Is it possible...

[ermora]

to create an method (either activex, or similar) that would be embbeded on a webpage that will (once clicked by the user), execute a game that is installed on the user's computer?

I'm in the process of creating a website (as a hobby) for a friend that will allow visitors to put themselves into a "slot" with the top most "slot" being the "host". When the "host" clicks the appropriate button, all within the slots will launch the associated game (having IP and other details automatically passed).

Similar to what Janes (combat flight simulator) did years ago with fighters anthology and other sims.

Anyhow, any thoughts suggests would be thankful.

 

[ermora]

I've thought of creating an installable program (the visitor would download) that the website would look for to do the necessary execution, but I don't want to burden the visitors computer because they will be playing a game that will require memory and cpu resources.

This is the only way that I can think of, outside of an ActiveX.

 

[Sheco]

You could do this with ActiveX but the users, unless they have intentionally lowered their browser's default security levels, will be prompted to download and execute the ActiveX.

 

[guitardave78]

Why not flip that idea around and use an applicaiton that looks at the website for availability of game slots (or just queries a remote database.
Kind of like a small custom web browser ( a mini gamespy arcade)
So slot availability is displayed maybe in a website, and if they are connecting to the site with the applicaiton, that application can then launch the game and set the relevant fields in the database.

}...the bane of my life!

http://www.fuzzyd.co.uk

 

[Tarwn]

There is a way, but it takes a little bit of configuration client-side. Several game sites in the past have led you through a registry change that would allow them to link the game status lines on their site to actually opening and playing the game.

Here is an example on opening notepad locally when the client see's a URL:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/networking/pluggable/overview/appendix_a.asp

Now what you would want to do is create a script or reg file to create the appropriate entry in the registry and then ask your users to download it in order to registers the games prefix for their browser. Then your game links would just need to have the prefix and whatever command-line arguments need to be passed (like the host ip address). So if your application could be executed like this:
app.exe [args] [remoteServer]

you could build a link like this:
MyGame:host.ip.add.ress

and then the browser would parse that based on your script (similar to the notepad one) and open the game.


Now, making the browser redirect. If you use an XMLHTTP object in your client-side javascript (or use that and an XMLHTTPRequest object to make it cross browser) you could do a check every 5 seconds or so to see if the game is ready to go. The game check could be as simple as querying back to the server with whatever args in the querystring. When the game is ready to go then the javascript would set window.location = "YourGame:host.ip.add.ress"

-T