----------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT for Interlude What Interlude is and what you need to do to set it up. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Interlude is a highly programmable networking link to allow many connections to communicate through one central hub. (the server) This type of program has been called a MUD (for Multi-User Dungeon) for some time now, but the notion is finally blossoming into its potential, which goes far beyond the simple textual fantasy-combat games from which the name derives. There is a huge potential for such networked collaboration environments for development, teaching, research, etc. Interlude is a 'next generation' server that tries to strip out the limitations and assumptions in the earlier platforms, leaving only a robust, general tool for interconnecting computers (and, ultimately, people) together. It has a lot of gee-whiz features you can read about in the 'propoganda' file ... most conspicuous of which is a new programming language called Coda, which attempts to syntesize advances in computer science abstraction with a simple syntax and semantics. Why is it called Interlude? no real reason ... it was going to be 'doodle' until i found out that was trademarked. I decided that acronyms are getting a little overused in the computer community, so i took Gavin's advice and named it something poetic. In music, an interlude is a simple, peaceful bridge between more complex, tumoltuous ends. Plus it uses the prefix 'Inter', which has to be on the cyber-culture's top ten favorites. ;-) ----------------------------------------------------------------- What do i do to get Interlude running? ----------------------------------------------------------------- you will need the recent gnu programming distribution to make this work. this specifically includes g++ (or the current version of gcc), flex, and the g++-include class library. if you have all of this installed, Interlude should theoretically compile by just typing 'make' in the 'interlude' directory. realistically, this won't work, and it will take a small amount of tweaking to get it to work since the g++ libraries aren't REALLY standard across machines. i would love to help if i can since cross platform support is your friend, so give me a yell if you have any questions. once it finally compiles right, there should be a file called 'inter' ... this is the main program. to get this to run, you type 'inter <database>' where <database> is the file name of the data you are using, without suffixes. for example, the sample starter database i include is called 'db.txt' ... if you want to run this, you type 'inter db' ... and it will take over from there. the first time you do this, it will notice that you don't have the special binary versions 'db.pag' and 'db.dir' compiled, so it will compile those from the text file. from then on, as long as you have the .pag and .dir files in the right place, 'inter db' will access these. once it's running, you should be able to connect to it at port 2056.