[MUD-Dev] Re: (Fwd) **NOTICE REGARDING YOUR SEARCHLIGHT SOFTWARE**

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 12:31 AM 8/2/98 -0700, I personally witnessed John Bertoglio jumping up
to say:
>
>A question: Given the existance of the RIP telnet client, why do do few
>MUDs support RIP graphics? 

RIP can be used to excellent effect and can make some truly wonderful
little sequences -- e.g. if you sign your name in a RIP drawing package,
when someone views the graphic they get to watch you sign your name -- but
in the end it means everyone gets to see EXACTLY how you built your image.
Anything even reasonably complex seems to sit there forever while almost
invisible details get added to the image. Imagine if you downloaded an
image on the net, and instead of getting the "final" image you got the
background base color, and then got to sit and watch the program build the
image bit by bit... sort of like fast-forwarding through an oil painting
show on PBS. 

I don't know about you, but as a user, I would find it tedious and boring
and quickly come to the conclusion that "RIP sucks". Wait a minute...
that's more or less what happened. Sort of like the ANSI drop-down menu
interface on VBBS. Everyone tried it and went "Ooohh... Aaahh... This is
slow and crappy, I'm going back to standard ANSI".

>Having worked extensively with RIP (hand coded,
>mostly, because of the pathetic draw/paint programs), I would think these
>would be much more popular. 

Pathetic draw/paint programs tend to be an obstacle to the adoption of a
graphic format. It would be significantly more bandwidth-effective to
translate an image into RIP *after* it was completed, anyway, not to
mention that (IIRC) RIP specifically requires a 640 by 350 window of 16
color graphics. RIP was so DOS-centered it was pathetic. In the BBS world,
that wasn't much of a problem. On the internet, it's a *big* problem. RIP
even had a specifically required character set, which didn't include any
characters for non-Roman alphabets... making RIP graphics inaccessible to
those who speak Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Greek, and
numerous other languages. RIP was designed by American DOS jockeys, for
American DOS jockeys. Any American DOS jockeys out there?

>Essentially, with much pain and suffering,
>virtually anything graphical including .WAV file downloads can be done with
>this protocal.

Pain and suffering are not popular, and therefore neither is RIP. I'd also
question the complexity of your RIP efforts, given that you're hand-coding
them... RIP works really well for small, simple graphics that are easily
defined geometrically. It absolutely sucks for anything of photographic
quality, and has all the efficiency of a UUEncoded BMP file. Certain BMP
files are pretty damn efficient. Most of them, however, are so huge you'd
have to be brain damaged to consider them acceptable for network transmission.