Re: Can I make money by writing IF?


30 Nov 1995 11:35:53 GMT

Greg Alt (galt@diamonds.cs.utah.edu) wrote:

: Just thought I'd mention an idea I had, since I have no time to do it
: myself... With WWW being the hip cool thing these days, I bet someone
: could make some money by doing IF on the web. Here's the basic idea:

Heh. I thought of this a while back. I toyed with the notion of hooking
the TADS UNIX runtime up to a Web page. Of course, it'd be a lot of work
because without the source to the runtime it'd be difficult to hack it
in well with a CGI. The biggest stumbling block would be remembering
states - how would the game engine keep track of who's playing and where
they happened to be? You'd have to have some sort of sign-in mechanism,
because with dynamic IP addressing used by most SLIP and PPP connections
these days you can't track a person by their IP address and user ID
like you used to be able to. And if multiple people were playing at
the same time you'd need multiple invocations of the runtime, which
could be expensive CPU-wise.

Anyway, I decided it was a nifty concept but far far beyond my meagre
powers of implementation and went off to find some new way to procrastinate
on my thesis.

- Neil K.

--
    Neil K. Guy  *  neilg@sfu.ca  *  tela@tela.bc.ca
        49N 16' 123W 7'  *  Vancouver, BC, Canada