From: rwallace@Athena.MIT.EDU
Message-Id: <9307221940.AA28825@m66-080-16>
To: rdshydur@Athena.MIT.EDU, zinky@Athena.MIT.EDU
Subject: Graphics in MOO
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 93 15:40:03 EDT


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To: moo-cows@parc.xerox.com
Cc: james@unidata.com
Subject: Re: Graphics in MOO?  
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 21 Jul 93 23:25:20 PDT."
             <199307220625.AA19791@melmac.risc.uni-linz.ac.at> 
Date: 	Sat, 10 Jul 1993 07:08:25 PDT
From: james@unidata.com
X-Mts: smtp

> I was wondering if anyone had, or was in the stages of doing or
> considering beginning, adding graphics to MOO?

I've had good luck with tektronix graphics and MOO. This is kind of a bizarre
approach, because the server is responsible for generating _all_ of the 
graphics, but it is very LCD. There are free emulators available for most 
platforms, such as Kermit (PC & Mac, I believe) and some-if-not-all "xterm"s.

Tek is an antique, vector-based, fairly comprehensive graphics protocol. You can 
generate color, patterned or dotted lines, curves (composed of line segments :), 
patterned fills, and text. You can get input from a (usually mouse-driven) 
crosshair, and you can still just type to plain ole' MOO. My compatriates and I 
have hooked our tek driver up to a street-grid generator, allowing us to walk, 
ride, or drive around in a little patch of city. Users can design their own 
graphic signs (from tek primitives or with a little "turtle" language), and all 
objects and users can be animated.

Tek is usable at 2400 bd, but the animation is pretty rough, and you don't want 
to give a 2400 bd user much detail.  At 14.4kbd or at network speeds, it looks 
pretty good.  We're still trying to figure out how best to animate things 
(currently, we're wiping the screen and redrawing, which is ugly). 

The most difficult part of getting started with tek is producing an 8 bit stream 
from MOO. I have two ways of doing this: a minimal client which recognizes 
escape sequences and generates the desired ascii codes, and an in-server ascii() 
function.

Hope this is helpful. Feel free to mail with any questions, comments, or 
suggestions.

  -James aka Minstrel -

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