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Hi
Aren't we always struggling to find the "next big thing"? My entire life, I've pushed myself, not always successfully, toward the cutting edge of whatever I'm involved in.
Recently, I came across an old Xerox PARC article about conferencing software based on MUD servers. While I didn't think multi-casting video was such a good idea, musing over this article did give me a thought about screen control.
curses is a terminal control library, as I'm sure many of you know, for UNIX that allows a program to move past the line-printer abstraction we've been stuck in so long and draw characters arbitrarily on a screen.
Now, it's a little complicated to extend this to a MUD, but very possible. Here's how we'd get a screen from a client:
[code]
int sock; /* file descriptor of client */
FILE *fd;
SCREEN s; /* curses-defined type for screen control */
fd = fdopen( sock, "r+" );
s = newterm( "vt100", fd, fd );
[/quote]
Then, we can do something creative like this:
[code]
set_term( connection->screen );
move( 10, 10);
printw( "Hello World!" );
[/quote]
This would print Hello World on the tenth line at the tenth column on the screen controlled by connection.
The concept of pop-up windows, one-touch menus and the like pop into my mind.
I've sucessfully tested the server (Thanks Visko) with Windows Telnet, and zMUD suppossedly supports vt102, so that shouldn't be a problem.
Anyway, let me know your thoughts. Hopefully, some good will come of this.
-Xanes -=- Lone Coder WinterMUTE
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