A couple of weeks ago, I experimented with using bluetooth to communicate hidden information from a game to a phone held by the players. While the prototype worked, there were issues with client side logic and lack of support for iOS.
Another way to achive the goal of displaying hidden information on the phone would be to create a web page that the phone could access. In the past, we have done this by having the game state in a MySQL database and php scripts to access the data. The game server and clients would poll the data watching for updates and sending their moves. This system was cumbersome, laggy and prone to error.
However, the web page is a nice way to provide the data to the clients. It is easy to layout a good looking interface, you can use javascript to allow the player to interact with the game and all phones have a web browser. The problem lies in the communication back to the C++ game.
One solution to this problem would be to use web sockets to send data back and forth between the clients and the game. Ideally, the C++ game would serve out the web pages that the clients display too so that people buying the game wouldn’t have to know how to setup a web server.
Mongoose is a simple web server with web socket support that can be compiled into a C++ application. With a couple of minor tweaks I got the mongoose code integrated into Torque.
Adding web sockets was a bit more problematic. The support for raw web socket connections comes with Mongoose, but I needed to write the code to send and receive the messages in the format expected by the chrome WebSocket class.