I've run to the end of my didactic experimentation—after a fully featured reyes/raytracer renderer, a 3d engine that actually works well, and an optimizing scheme to ppc compiler, I need something challenging and fun to do. So, I'm going to tackle two challenges at once (well, three): a terminal (vt100 escape sequences, I guess) MMORPG written in c++! (though I might give D a serious try...)

So: I'm good with the C++ for now; most of the difficult challenges I've already tackled head-on. The difficult part, obviously, is the networking and, for now, the terminal stuff.

So, terminal stuff first: What's the best way to tackle this? I'm trying to avoid ncurses, since this is supposed to be fun, and therefore challenging, so I'd like to use termcap or terminfo. Are there any good references for how to use them, preferably online?

Also: mmorpg. Are there any academic papers on this? Usually, there isn't shared state, of a sort, between connections. I'm not even sure where to start on this problem. Any resources?

Cheers! -Duane.

Not sure exactly what you want to do with the terminal stuff, but you should check out the openpty, login_tty, and forkpty functions. The openpty function gives you a master and slave handle for a couple of pipes and you write in one and read from the other, can't tell you much more right now as it's been a while since I looked at it.