[crossfire] Telnet support

[Mark Wedel]

Mitch Obrian wrote:
>
     
      Why always the "go and do it yourself" answer?
     
     
  If you want something done, do it yourself? :)

  But the issue, which has been discussed, is that crossfire is a volunteer project.

  As such, most people that are going to work on it are going to do things they 
find interesting.  Perhaps you can find a developer that will find writing an 
ASCII client interesting.  I, however, am not that developer, so I won't be 
writing one.

  In fact, even fixing bugs is something that I don't find interesting to do - 
I'd much rather spend my time working on 'grander' aspects of programming for 
the game.  But at some level, one has to do some of the more mundane work - 
doing only cool stuff but never fixing bugs would probably result in a program 
that has tons of bells and whistles but crashes every 5 minutes.

  Also, there has never been a pure only text client that I am aware of in the 
entire history of crossfire.  So it is not like this is functionality that 
disappeared - this is new functionality that needed (the telnet interface that 
used to exist basically still exists - it never allowed one to play the game, it 
is just back in way back times, you needed to connect via telnet to tell the 
server to display the X11 client back to your display.  But once you did that, 
it was still graphical.

  So writing a ASCII client/interface is not just a trivial amount of work - I'd 
say it would actually take quite a bit of work.

  The other issue is the related demand/usefulness.  Most developers, myself 
included, are more willing to write code that will be used by a bunch of people 
and not a few.  I just have a hard time believing that lots of people are 
clamoring for a ASCII client.  It's not like there are likely many systems that 
don't have sufficient graphics to play the game.