[tetrinext] Re: let's talk about the chat interface MODULE.

[Kevin Kreamer <kkreamer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 5 Mar 2000, Jared Johnson wrote:
> 
> > Seriously, if we so wanted, we could have a window or area of the screen,
> > where an existing irc client could open (say, epic4 or bitchx) so that the
> > users could have all their preferences already done (wrt to coloring, and
> > nick completion, and whatever).  Or we could have our game be in a
> > bitchx/epic4/whatever window.  In either case, the actual communication is
> > done over existing IRC connections, possibly via a new channel.  You could
> > even have it so that lurkers could watch games in progress by watching
> > (and possibly decoding) the messages sent in that IRC channel. (How to do
> > this all is left as an exercise to the reader, as I haven't the slightest
> > idea :-/ ) 
> 
> there are some obstacles to doing alot of the stuff you're talking about. 
> first, it has to work on just about any platform.  This prevents us from
> incorporating TINT into any particular client, er incorporating any 
> particular client into
> TINT -- that is, any particular client we don't write for ourselves.  Sending
> any game data over an IRC type connection would not be a very good idea for 
> many
> reasons =)

I actually was suggesting that we send all the game data over an IRC
type connection.  Let's disregard the fact that it's impossible, and
let's do it :-) Seriously, I didn't suggest that it was *good* idea, it
simply was an idea.  It would easily separate the backend of network
communication with the front-end graphical pretty pictures.  The IRC
network would do the work of getting my move to all the other players.
Basically, I have a few more ideas about how to do this, but if it's a
generally stupid idea, tell me and I'll shut up about it :-)

> 
> This is very interesting, though.  If there were some way to let people use
> their own IRC clients to chat instead of our minimal client, that would 
> really own.
> It's just that it would probably have to a completely seperate thing from
> normal gameplay.  Sort of analogous to what Tetrix does now for admins, but 
> make it
> available to everyone, and make it a bit less broken.  Allow people to 
> interface
> with the chat and some of the commands (like viewing the winlist and whatnot)
> via IRC.  I don't see any sane way to let people do this and play at the same
> time, though.  Something like that would be very hacky.
> 

We could simply fork an instance of bitchx, epic,
your.favorite.irc.client, and have it's input/output done in a window of
our program (kinda how ddd has a gdb console window, where you can
interact with gdb directly).  This would definitely work on any form of
Unix; I'm not sure how Windows or BeOS, for instance, would handle it.  I
would think it would be fairly easy to do, and it would save us the work
of writing a small IRC client (and hearing the complaints that it doesn't
do feature foo that user bar wants :-)  This would probably work,
irregardless of how the gameplay is done.

> I think we will have to end up basically writing a very minimal interface to
> chat and gameplay into the core, and then from there extend with things like 
> extra
> chat functionality and perhaps an IRC interface.
> 

-- 
Kevin Kreamer
FsckIt on #debian