Any interest in a palace-like program?

[Sman™]

First I want to apologize if this is in the wrong place, but I couldn't find a forum for off topic posts.

Now a little background, for a number of years now I have been quietly working on a palace-like program that will have all the features of The Palace, but is free of any potential legal/copyright concerns due to patents or protocols. The software is just coming out of the pre-alpha phase of development and is far from being "feature complete". However, it is stable and has around sixty percent of the features planned for the first version either completed or partially implemented.

I am curious if members of the palace community have any interest in such a software system. Would anyone be interested in helping to design, program or test this software? The project could be open sourced if enough interest was expressed in community development. A new program has the potential to access databases(i.e. SQL), and to support newer more powerful scripting languages(Java/Python maybe). Do you think these features would be enough to get palace users and administrators to migrate to a new software system if conversion tools were provided?

If anyone would like more information I can post a link to a website with details and an alpha download.

[maarten]

Actually developers stuff in the developers forum is correct :)

Ok sounds cool, we had two alternatives in the past, one free: Welcome To iPalaces.com and the other with a paid server / client feature thing MadWolf Software - The Manor online avatar chat community

Personally I think a chat with database access / user registration and a java frontend can be very intresting. But not sure if Palace users would switch. To be honest I think after 10 years the people who are on Palace are so by choice. Not sure they would switch to a new "universe" unless it brings all the old friends with them. So I would focus on a new community first. It is the basic catch 22: people come where people are so how do you get them to come there in the first place...

If you have something that can run from a webbased client, plugin for browser type of chat you could reach a big audience, not sure another client / server closed community would get enough people to take off. Sorry to be less then positive, I guess the only way you can find out if this will ever take off is to try it out :)

[Sman™]

First I would like to thank you for sharing your thoughts.

I have heard of Manor, but iPalaces is new to me. This software will be be free like iPalaces, but I am trying to keep the requirements as low as I can to give as many palace users as possible access to it. P3 shouldn't have a problem at all and I am only compiling/optimizing for i586 at the the moment.

I discovered The Palace in 2000 just before Communities.com packed up and by 2003 I was helping friends get their Linux servers configured and pushing the limits of IptScrae with my scripts. I know what you mean when you talk about a decade of experiences. I think many would be open to the idea of switching if they could keep their props/avs and their friends could switch too(which means owners need to be able to convert servers at that time too); however, a full conversion toolkit is not around the corner so I do have to focus on a new community for the moment.

I don't know how easily I would be able to plug my software directly into a browser, but I have written scripts for websites in the past using Perl and PHP to work with SQL databases. I know it would be possible to have a website looking at the same databases that the server is using, and I can think of a few ways to integrate the chat client/server with databases that also have web pages reading them. It's really a question of what the community would like to see in the chat system. Being a palace user myself I would like to see people from that community help to shape this program.

A very simple website that has more information and an installer can be found here.

[Sman™]

Quote: Originally Posted by Sman™

A very simple website that has more information and an installer can be found here.

I don't believe it got many visitors, but I began to worry my simple handwritten HTML website may have had an unprofessional appearance. This led me to install a complete php CMS, select a generic theme, add a rough screen shot, copy over info from the simple website, setup a forum, and then delete the old site. This is a huge improvement and anyone that maybe have been turned away by the plain site should take a second look.