Merlin?? I had a copy of that for my Aple IIgs, only no hard drive, so I could never use the dang thing. Sigh.. Actually 48k was not a big deal, especially since you could actually hand code machine language on Apples without spending a century just figuring out what all the bloody opcodes where for. The 286 was bad, 386 worse, 486 even worse, I haven't even bothered looking with the new chips and the new 64 bit AMD will have opcodes so complicated I don't even want to think about it. ;) I miss being able to do quick and dirty stuff on my Apple, which included using assembly. Now unless you have an old copy of qbasic, you have to spend a week just looking up how to do the same thing you did a year before, even to program in Visual Basic. lol
btw Checked out the lark.crod.com mud... Why is it again that they have to make objects in a room bright blue and underlined, but can't use the mxp color to show the lilacs in one room as 'lilac'?? Not sure that site is a good example of 'using' mxp, unless I completely missed something I needed to turn on to make it work right. Not that I want to go back anyway, I also hate their mini map thing (makes me feel clostraphobic after the full outside maps on AoD) and I don't like the idea of 'you must do this this way to advance past level 25'. :p I would hate to see what people would do with an idea I had.
The idea being to create an addon that takes a text file containing scene code based on POVRay and actually raytrace a small 160x100 image of it. A lot more versitile that using graphics, since A) text is often smaller, especially compressed and B) you can set internal features of the script to adjust lighting, sky textures, sun/moon position, etc., all based on what is really happening on the mud. Not sure how to even begin developing it though, especially since it would detract from my mud play. lol
Figure it would have to be one of three things. A COM server object called from a script (bit of a problem doing it that way, since how do you make sure the data gets recieved correctly...). A proxy that sits between the client and windows (Not a clue how this would work). Or something built into a client (but in a seperate thread <is this even possible?>, since the render needs to take place even while the client does other stuff). Most scenes would take a few seconds even on a fast machine to produce, and may need to use several passes if I included support for true glass ior and reflections, which add a lot of calculation time. Not to mention fog or other stuff. Oh well, maybe I will get around to trying to do it eventually. ;) |