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From: svanegmo@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca (Stephen van Egmond)
Subject: Re: Can I make money by writing IF?
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Date: Fri, 1 Dec 1995 18:03:25 GMT
References: <49cs9f$934@life.ai.mit.edu> <49e71c$2oa@nntp.Stanford.EDU> <49iofd$2h7@magus.cs.utah.edu> <49k4up$i0h@grid.direct.ca>
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In article <49k4up$i0h@grid.direct.ca>, Neil K. Guy <nkg@grid.direct.ca> wrote:
> 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.

Me too.  Only, I wanted to do it with a zmachine, since hey, there's the 
source for it.  I bumped into the same damn problem as you did, and 
couldn't find any way of adequately managing multiple callers (especially 
since many httpd's don't send the user ID!)

One approach is to hand each person a particular id# that makes up part 
of the URLs they access the pages with.  Like

http://bla.org/game?id=502

IDs would persist for perhaps an hour in case you had to walk away for 
some reason, and the CGI (should) be able to handle multiple instances 
without having to launch multiple interpreters.

However, with the advent of Java, all this is irrelevant.  The client 
machine can keep the state, and run the Zip,  and... hey, it just hit me 
where Sun got the idea for a platform-independent system for doing very 
cool stuff.


