I don't suppose they would care. It's not like anyone used it anymore. I offered to take over and revitalize it, but got brushed off. It's almost like they want it dead and buried.
Come on guys…bridge the networks for real. It's obvious that it needs to happen.
I've tried a few times to get some discussion going on this, but the MB admins don't seem very interested. Kyasin made a public post indicating he was up for it, but then I never got any responses from him after that.
I assume that Davion and Kinasyn are now a little older and have full time jobs and maybe even significant others that they have to pay the bulk of their attention to. I sympathize and congratulate them on this, not necessarily in that respective order.
Before they allow IMC2 and this site to fall into complete ruin and disrepair, though, it would be nice if they spent the few hours on handing over the reins to people who still care enough to devote time to the hobby.
Also, are there any examples of an intermud client or router written in something other than C/C++ (say Python, Java, ruby, etc)? I think part of the lack of concern may be that the spec appeared to be heavily tailored to LPMuds. Not that I'm saying that there's anything wrong with LPMuds, I don't think there is and wouldn't know if there was, but there are other mud servers used and I'm not sure how anyone would be able to make heads or tails of how their implementation ought to behave. A test server for be anyone to check an implementation against (i.e. try to contact it and see if they get the expected results) without being kicked or something might be/have been good.
Quite the opposite Nathan…. Both I3 and IMC2 are MUD agnostic. The only things which tend to be genre specific are the color codes (IMC2 uses ROM-style tilde-letter codes, I3 uses Pinkfish codes), and the slots in the mud-info data fields which make a few assumptions (I3 expects you to have a driver and mudlib, for example).
Don't be fooled by I3 claiming to require "mudmode" sockets. That's just a silly binary protocol layer atop a standard TCP socket, which happens to be supported in the MudOS driver. Essentially, it's a 16-bit network-byte-order integer holding the string length of the data, followed by… the data.
The only issue with merging networks is that IMC2 client code tends to be annoyingling coupled to the specific mud's structure. That is, most Dikurivatives are NOT modular enough to easily swap different protocols in or out, as they have to tie directly into the player data structures, the chat system (if any), the load/save format code, the color translation, and the command parser. Hence, very few non-LP muds use I3 directly (WileyMUD does, very old versions of AFKMUD did).
That said, there *IS* an IMC2 bridge which mostly works (color code translation seems to still be an issue), but one has to convince all the MUDs out there to either switch to it (many have), or convince the admins of the IMC2 network to implement a bridge themselves. The reason THAT hasn't happened is political.
It used to be run by the Lima crew (I believe Deathblade, specifically), then they let it lapse and someone else picked up the domain and then HE went off the grid, but he was nice enough to hand the domain over to me before stripping nude, coating himself in paint, and bounding into the wilderness. Unfortunately he did that while a project at my workplace went completely thermonuclear and I spent very little time doing anything else, and I plumb forgot I control that domain.
Now that I remember, and if I have time in the coming weeks, I'll dig around for the content he generously provided and I'll see about having it back up.
As you can probably tell, I have the very best interests of intermud at heart, but not really very much time, so if people want to participate (eg provide documentation or maybe admin a forum if I get one up) post here. Don't personal-message me, I probably won't notice. Post here and let's talk about it.
That said, there *IS* an IMC2 bridge which mostly works (color code translation seems to still be an issue), but one has to convince all the MUDs out there to either switch to it (many have), or convince the admins of the IMC2 network to implement a bridge themselves. The reason THAT hasn't happened is political.
I think the reason used to be political when Davion and Kiasyn still cared enough. Now they just don't care, and that's the current reason nothing changes.
A test server for be anyone to check an implementation against (i.e. try to contact it and see if they get the expected results) without being kicked or something might be/have been good..
Most people I know who went out to create their own client just setup their own server. That allowed them greater control over their testing.
Don't be fooled by I3 claiming to require "mudmode" sockets. That's just a silly binary protocol layer atop a standard TCP socket, which happens to be supported in the MudOS driver. Essentially, it's a 16-bit network-byte-order integer holding the string length of the data, followed by… the data.