So, has anyone ever considered the possibility of incorporating AIM into MUSHclient? I have no idea whether this is possible or not, but I figured it was worth a shot. What could be better than having one of your tabs dedicated to AIM, eliminating the need for a useless program to suck up your computer's resources with unnecessary graphics and functions.
Looking into the matter, I've found that AOL offers SDKs for AIM and even has examples of source code in various languages. I was thinking the best route would be to try and go with VB for this one (what a better time to actually learn VB!). Info here on the OSCAR protocol AIM uses:
http://dev.aol.com/aim/oscar/
So before I even give this a shot, has anyone ever tried this before and confirm that it would be an utter waste of time in that it can't be done? Any tips would help, as well. Thanks!
I haven't tried it. I can forsee problems that MUSHclient is already a client of the MUD, trying to make it a client of AIM as well may conceivably run into problems of "who is running the main loop, anyway?".
It is possible it will work, but I can't help much with the technical details, not having attempted anything like that.
Let me say I don't use MUSHclient, but here is a thought:
Since it is apparently highly scriptable, why not wrtie an IRC client to connect to bitlbee? This would also avoid issues of people logging in from two diffrent locations (main AIM/Yahoo/ect clients, plus MUSHClient).
In the past I would have MUSHclient save output to a text file that was read by an external script that could send IMs to AIM and receive them as well for MUSHclient to open.
I presume the protocols are different. I am not an expert in IRC at all, but what I just looked up on Wikipedia seems to indicate it is a TCP-based protocol (similar in concept to the MUD chat which is already implemented).
You might be able to get somewhere by using Lua (and Luasocket) to open a chat connection, and periodically check if something incoming has arrived.
I am reluctant to start adding bits and pieces on (like IRC, AIM, and so on) when external programs already exist to do these things. There was a time when someone wanted me to incorporate an FTP client into MUSHclient.
What might work, if you can find it, is to find an IRC client that has some external "hooks" (eg. via COM) so it could do the bulk of the work, and MUSHclient could ask it from time to time what is happening.
It's odd because I know I once used an IRC client to connect to a MUD server so I had hope they were similar enough. Then when I searched the forum I took some threads to mean that people are using MUSHclient to connect to IRC.
But I guess those are not vanilla installations of MUSHclient.
I was actually looking into instant messaging clients that could send or receive UDP packets but thanks for the info about using COM, I am going to bother IRC admin.
And I guess someday being able to boot into a MUSHclient operating system is right out <g>
To register to an irc network, after you connect you could do something like
nick RelientF
user bigd localhost server :some random person
You should then get all the weird stuff you normally see when you connect.
To send a message, use privmsg. For example
privmsg &bitlbee :identify Some20Random20Password
Note that privmsg is both for channels and users, and directly before you put a string you need to put a :