On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 10:44:46AM -0500, Karthik Arumugham wrote: > I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me on this, but I still don't > see the point of a Windows server port. We have a shortage of players now, > not a shortage of servers. Suddenly having dozens of poorly connected > Windows servers show up on the metaservers won't help things any... I agree, mostly. I think better time is spent improving the client. The idea of a stand-alone server that runs on the client machine is nice, but we can get most of any benefits from that setup by having a real, dedicated newbie server with training bots. While I commend Darryl and others for trying to do a complete Java rewrite, I think that those "reimplementations" will have little to no benefit in improving the netrek player base. Regardless of the technical differences between Java and C/C++, any Java port will require substantial man-hours of implementation and testing without the help of most of our existing developer base that, I would guess, will continue to work on Vanilla, COW and other software. I really wish we could try to consolidate our development efforts. We merged the INL server functionality into Vanilla, so the server dev is pretty well organized. But there are simply too many clients with people forking off in different directions. -- Dave Ahn | ahn at vec.wfubmc.edu | Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Try to live your life so that when you die, you will rejoice and the world will cry. -1/2 jj^2