I have been reading through the xmpp theory and trying to get an overview.
I have a question, could powers be given a name linked to each character as I saw this in the basic theory and was trying to figure a way to activate powers.
You can login with multiple locations for instance as test@titan.com and then have your powers logged in as test@titan.com/power1 and the conversation your powers have activate the animation? I am trying to get my head around this it would seem the ability of XMPP to allow multiple concurrent logins would help if the powers were run from instanced servers?
If I am way off base a simple sorry won't do that is good
*If* I understand what you're saying, that's not really a good idea. First of all, the problem with activating powers is simply that power activation was a server-side thing, and therefore Codewalker has to program Paragon Chat to understand the fundamentals of how to do that. PC currently has no idea how to spawn power bolt projectiles, for example, so there's no way for any player or bot to do that.
I think what you are thinking is that the problem is literally activation; that the powers would work if we could only figure out how to tell the game to do that. But that's not the case.
In a sense, think of XMPP and more precisely Paragon Chat's implementation of XMPP as a translator. Its a CoH to Kind-of-English translator, but with a very limited dictionary. When something happens in your game client, that is sent to Paragon Chat. Paragon Chat converts the CoH network message into ParagonChat-ese, and that's sent to the XMPP server, which sends that to everyone else connected to that server. Their Paragon Chat programs convert the ParagonChat-ese into CoH network messages and send those to their game clients, and they see what you did. And vice versa.
Because ParagonChat-ese is XMPP and in Kind-of-English, its possible to inject messages into it without even running Paragon Chat, vis-a-vis bots. But the bots can only talk in ParagonChat-ese. ParagonChat-ese has no words for "Please Execute Energy Blast's Power Bolt." You can't say it, so you can't tell Paragon Chat to do it. To make that happen, Codewalker has to add those words into Paragon Chat's dictionary, and have the appropriate conversion into CoH network message protocol.
Now, *IF* Codewalker figures out how to add the appropriate words to Paragon Chat's XMPP message dictionary, *THEN* there are certain advantages bots might have. Separate from being able to do something in theory, for a player to do it you need some kind of control to make it happen. For example, consider
power animations. Right now, if you wanted your character to look like they were firing invisible Sniper Blasts, you'd need to play two animations: the Sniper Blast Windup, and then the Sniper Blast shot. You'd have to do that yourself, somehow, by typing in the two commands back to back with a pause between, or use macro buttons. Not convenient. Bots don't have that problem, because bots don't have game controls. A bot can simply be programmed to send the first message, pause one second, and then send the second one. Bots can be scripted, in ways players currently cannot be (although Codewalker is thinking about embedding LUA, a separate discussion topic). So *WHEN* Paragon Chat has more "power stuff" in its dictionary, bots might be able to do certain things better than players might be able to do, and that opens the door to bots potentially being player-helpers as well.