My friends and I have been playing connect-4 a lot, and so I whipped up a quick and sloppy site to play it on -- it's all in ajax so everything's automagic (not like chessnuts was, if you remember it) -- but the code is pretty sloppy. It renders fine on Firefox and IE 7. Haven't tested anything else just yet. You need frames, javascript, and session cookies enabled to use it.

Here's the link: http://mjmtest.no-ip.org/connect4/

There is no one player mode, you'll have to create a game and wait for a joiner, or if anyone else is on, join theirs. There's a 30 second timeout, and it's not very low-speed friendly. Also if you have metered bandwidth, don't bother, it'll just run up your bills. (Remember: I made this quickly and sloppily.)

Feel free to use the site, just don't try to hack anything please. (I haven't even bothered with security, and what's worse, it's hosted on my development server... but it's safe for the clients.)

It appears to work properly on Opera (v9.22). I was able to join a game, but the creator isn't responding, so I don't know if the playing part works (I assume it does since everything else does).

I noticed that if you quit a game that you've joined it counts it as a loss. While this makes sense in normal circumstances, I think it would be better if it counted as neither a loss nor a win if you quit before a single move is made, or if the other player hasn't responded with a certain time frame.

As for the game: I'll be leaving the server running, so have fun; I might optimize the game for low bandwidth at some point. Glad to hear it mostly works on opera.

It's not logged anywhere, so it doesn't really "count". The evilest thing ever my gf did to me: I added a /me switch, and she typed "/me has left the game" -- so I quit too and was like "what's up?" but she was still in the game, me leaving was a forfeit! that sneak! -- In the future you can tell if someone really left or not, because if the game is not over, it will announce the winner when it announces them leaving the game!

Tried it right now but nobody was on. :S

The good side is that it reminded me that I planned to program a variant of connect four that me and my friends like to play a lot.
(Which I got to a playable state* today. )
*-Works, but the AI is a bit weak.
So atleast thanks for that.

Should be more like 5 to 10 depending on what window/etc you're in. But yeah, don't play it on a modem or on metered bandwidth.

That's strange, what version of firefox are you using? It works great in all the firefoxes I've tried it on (Though I think they were all 2.0 at least) IP address has nothing to do with how it tracks your identity -- I did most of the testing on a single computer by flipping between IE7 and Firefox 2.

Hmmm, If it's anything I bet it's network traffic. I wonder why it would do that though.

Clicking send forces a network update, while normally it's supposed to update the chat about 3 times a second without any activity. (That's just the chat though, lots of other things on the page update themselves too.)

I'll think about it -- it just seems less responsive to me at once a second; Edit: I'm more concerned with trimming down the network traffic that each hit gets than with how often it hits.

That one is not a very good example, and that one I believe is only requested once a second and there was only one person logged in (what if there was 200?).

There are requests that if there were a lot of traffic on the server would be several KB of data.

For instance the chat window, instead of sending only new data, sends everything that's transpired in the last four hours. (It was a quick hack) -- I'd like to fix that first. But yeah, if it's really a big deal, when I get home tonight, I can upperize those delays.

First off, I'm not using asp.net ajax, this was all a quick hack. Secondly Yeah I know, hence like I said above, I'd like to trim down the volume of data it sends as opposed to how often it is sent.

I know. I'm just not. It was easier to write, and I might fix it someday. Hell it would be better if I just sent one packet of data to the client that had all of the changes since their last packet of data -- users, chat, etc. This is my main priority for changes on this project -- if I'm ever motivated to work on it.

I don't get any in firefox... what browser/version are you using?

Umm this is exactly what I just suggested... You just send all the data on the page's first load, and then only send changes. Yeah, it's the right way. But like I said, this was a quick hack (Something like ~six hours of coding) and if I use it enough, I might invest some time rewriting it. As for now: it works, (and it's fast on all of the foreign machine's I've tested it on) and yeah I'll get around to fixing the couple of bugs, but I'm not motivated enough to completely rewrite the game's protocol at the moment.

Yeah, it's just a matter of me being lazy. If I do a serious site or anything for a customer it wouldn't be this horrible. I upped the delays somewhat.