Key is Copyright (C) 1996-1998 by Paul Mclachlan, Jason Crane, and George Wright v0.9 beta 6th October, 1998 I guess I should write a little bit about what makes Key so cool. o Key is written in Java. It was going to be the first talker written in Java, and it would have been, if I'd been happy at leaving it as just a talker. But noooo... I had to go and do everything else thats in this file. But being in Java does mean that you can run the talker in Windoze, if you must, or at least that we don't have to worry about different types of unix. ;) It's also all object-oriented, and some of the new features of 1.1 (which key really pre-dates, so it doesn't use them yet), such as reflection, promise some great advantages for sections of the program. Besides, Java is cool. o Key has a proper telnet protocol implementation. It works out client terminal types and window sizes, and cool stuff like that. This bit is fairly pluggable, if anyone is looking for an implementation of a telnet server in Java... o The system is very powerful, allowing you to set arbitrary properties for players or commands online, or set up new ranks or groups, pretty much however you want. For example, if someone's title is annoying you, you can just set ~someone.title "" to clear it. If you want to change what "say" outputs _online_, you can, with something like: set /commandsets/base/say.broadcast "%o mumbles '%m'" Which would instantly change everyones says to be like: subtle mumbles 'hey, man!' If I want to give an individual person, for example, the trace command, I don't have to rely on any hard coded rank, I can literally instantiate it just for them. instant commands.Trace trace (will return something like 'made new /players/subtle/trace') and then: shift ~me/trace ~someone.commands and they instantly have the new command available. (actually, you'd need to initialise their command list "set #someone.commands CommandList" first, or it wouldn't work. but you get the idea) o Because it's OO, you can create very specialised rooms - rooms that people can't leave, or rooms where you can't see who is in them, or rooms which will disconnect anyone who walks in - all online, just by writing the code and dynamically loading it into the system. Eventually, people will be able to write their own java code, compile it, and ftp it up into key, so they can create their own special objects, just like a MOO, but without the annoying programming language. (ie, they can use Java), o We have plans for adding graphics to rooms, and sounds as well, mainly for when we write our own applet with which to connect. The modular 'interactive connection' design, however, will permit it still to remain backward compatible with telnet sessions, for those people still stuck on Amiga's with 1200 baud modems. (hell, where do you think I started out? not that I'm bitter). o And finally, it 'almost' implements everything that is in EW. Which is really quite a bit. It took us forever to write the code for all those finnicky commands, but its down now. I don't expect you to use Key out of the box. It's not really for out of the box admins. It's for people who want to write their own talker/mud/moo, but want to skip the 2 years development work just getting something 'usable' and cool. Key is well designed if a little rough around the edges - it will make a good 'starting point' for making a unique talker. Anything is better than taking a stock standard copy of PG-96, surely. ;) (No offence, Mike. ;)