Received: from ATHENA-AS-WELL.MIT.EDU by po7.MIT.EDU (5.61/4.7) id AA16137; Wed, 21 Jul 93 14:43:19 EDT Received: from M66-080-1.MIT.EDU by Athena.MIT.EDU with SMTP id AA21339; Wed, 21 Jul 93 14:43:17 EDT From: rwallace@Athena.MIT.EDU Received: by m66-080-1 (5.57/4.7) id AA24749; Wed, 21 Jul 93 14:43:15 -0400 Message-Id: <9307211843.AA24749@m66-080-1> To: rdshydur@Athena.MIT.EDU, zinky@Athena.MIT.EDU, jpbonsen@Athena.MIT.EDU Subject: graphics in MOO 2 Date: Wed, 21 Jul 93 14:43:14 EDT ------- Forwarded Message Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1993 10:40:55 PDT From: David Engberg Subject: Re: Graphics in MOO? In-Reply-To: "; from \"Tyrie J. Grubic\" at Jul 21, 93 10:19 am I " To: tyrie@cs.washington.edu (Tyrie J. Grubic) Cc: moo-cows.PARC@xerox.com Message-Id: <199307211740.KAA09144@elaine18.Stanford.EDU> > > I was wondering if anyone had, or was in the stages of doing or > considering beginning, adding graphics to MOO? curiously enough, adding graphics support to a server (like Moo) is fairly easy ... it's just another type of data that you have to deal with manipulating the problem comes in the clients ... to do something like what you envision, someone will have to sit down and write _AT_LEAST_ two clients (x-windows and msdos with modem) plus a decent editing environment to make the images in the first place. they will have to deal with calibrating colors and resolutions between platforms, plus deal with the different communications and graphics mechanisms underlying the client. even assuming you find someone who has both the time and talent to write these, you have to deal with serious issues of transmission and storage: you undoubtedly want something cool enough looking to be worthwhile, but you don't want to eliminate use by people on 2400bps modems. if your server has to send out five or ten 1k graphical objects per second, it's swiftly going to consume all of its bandwidth, so you're going to want to force the clients to cache some of the images, at least in memory, hopefully on disk... now the client writer needs to be proficient in DB tools. etc... i'd give someone else's left arm if some large, high-level MU* group could get together to hammer out a decent graphics standard and protocol so that different people could get to work on writing clients, editors, servers etc... without wasting/duplicating effort. but we all know that if you get more than 5 people together on a MU*, they're lucky if they can even decide what their names are, let alone anything controversial and _useful_. oh well ... a hound can dream. dave ------- End of Forwarded Message