I decided to embark on a new programming adventure. As many of you know, I've run the Disabilities-R-Us chat room for a lot of years now. Things are good as is, but after playing a lot of online text adventure games recently, I thought I would try to intermingle the two concepts. When completed, it will be a chat room where not only can you talk with people, you can also interact with "things" and "characters" in the room if you feel so inclined. I know there's already something like that already -- they're called MUDs (or MUSHs) -- but those require learning a whole new set of concepts and that's not something I want to force upon the regular users.
So, this month I started writing a custom IRC server to facilitate all this. All of it from scratch, I should add. I know there are a buttload of existing IRCDs out there too but they're all designed for large scalable multi-server networks. In a word: Overkill. I'm just one server all by itself with no desire to ever create a vast empire of linked servers.
The other reason to write it all myself is so that I can also embed TCL into it. This will make adding the new MUD/MUSH features a lot easier and I wont have to bring down the server to do it. Also, since TCL is byte-code compiled, it will be fast. If this sounds like something you might be interested in helping with, send me a note.
Thanks to the great people over at Sourceforge, the GPLed code will be available on it's project page as soon as I get the code into an alpha state.