Casino card games

Hello all,
I'm very new to SL, although I'd rate myself as an intermediate level C++ programmer, so I don't anticipate too many problems in getting up to speed with SL's scripting language.

One project I've been working on in NWN (NeverWinterNights) that I want to translate to SL is a poker room. I was figuring on starting with 5 card draw or Texas Hold'Em and building from there. I did some forum searches for casino and card games and really didn't find much, so I'm curious as to what challenges people have run into with implementing such in SL?

Based on the capabilities of the SL scripting language, does anyone have any general opinions on how to best:

1) Tell a player at the table what their face down cards are without letting anyone else know and make it easy for them to recheck their cards if they've forgotten? For example, would it likely be best to instant message each player with their hole cards with a listen() routine setup to catch them saying something like "cards" that would IM their cards to them again? I read that sending an IM puts a script into a sleep state for about a second, so is there a better way to securely get card info to a player without such a delay? Is it possible to put a script on something like a chair the player has to sit in and have the main "dealer" script message to the player's chair the cards the player has and have that handle IMing the player with their hole cards?

2) How best to handle betting... in card games its best to play "table stakes", which means you'd buy in for chips (instead of playing directly with L$) and can only buy more chips between hands. There seems to be a distinct lack of ability to store data persistently (short of using some outside server), so how do you best keep track of the number of chips a given player has bought in for without being at risk of someone cheating the system somehow?

Thanks for any insights you can share,
Tigsen

Hiya Tig! Long time no see, yes, same Archaegeo from NWN.

Look me up in game, im also working on Texas Hold'em, maybe we could collaborate our efforts, or you can see what else im up to in SL

Archaegeo Platini

aka Archaegeo Neosophy, HCR, NWN

Hiya Archaegeo,
I'll look for you in game, I'll likely be on this Wednesday evening (the 25th) sometime around 10pm PST. How do I most easily find you in-game?

I've already written routines for NWN that, when passed a hand, can figure out its value... therefor its easy to compare several different players' hands and figure out who has the best. The biggest challenge I see is going to be keeping track of chips (as mentioned above), communications with the "dealer" (which really shouldn't be too much of a problem at all), and just figuring out how to get the SL language to do what I want it to do.

Tigs

Email: [email]tigsen_nospam@yahoo.com[/email]
just remove the _nospam portion after tigsen to get my proper email, if you want to email me.

Correction, I should be online Thursday night instead of Wednesday (tonight), at around 10pm PST.

Tigs

I have actually just finished a beta version of draw poker and I am just finishing up texas holdem.

I probably will have a beta poker tournament either today or tomorrow if you're interested .. keep an eye on the events or IM me in SL.

Blaze,
Definitely let me know where your card game is at... I probably can't make it to any beta today/tonight, but would love to pop by sometime and take a look at what you've done, how you've handled various things (like letting players know what cards they have), etc.

Tigs