This is going to sound a little strange to many people, but bear with me for a bit. VRIM3 is currently under (incredibly slow) development and is slowly shaping its outline. General users won't notice a whole lot different (minus some slight polishing), but the secondary goal (under which I label VRIM as "FreezeMessenger") is much more than providing a decent instant messenging experiment to Victory Road: it is providing one to the world.
VRIM3 will promote three kinds of active third-party development, and I would like to know if anyone has any interest in any of the following. VR has a lot of programmers and a lot of people who know a second (cultural) language, so please post here if you might want to explore the underlying framework or even translate it into one of many different languages. At any rate, here are the three forms of development:
- Translation: Translating Simple Phrases and Sentences into Other Languages, like Japanese, Spanish, French, and Italian
- Plugin Development (Mainly PHP+MySQL): The Creation of Plugins for VRIM/FreezeMessenger That Any (per your terms and conditions) Webmaster, Host, or Cheney Could Use to Their Liking
- Client Development (Any Programing Language Under the Sun / Oracle of Seasons): Creating Clients for Servers Running VRIM/FreezeMessenger to Give Users a Better Experience, Cool New Features, or a More Streamlined User-Interface
While many users have seen VRIM's somewhat rocky development due to occasionally poor server planning and my own frequent stupidity, the product truly is developing into something unrivaled, and much more refined than, say, Xat or IRC (if you want to yell at me for this, please do). By making it possible for foreign-language websites to use the software or for people to access the interface in ways that go beyond the contemporary, a new, better, and occasionally-crashier-if-you-are-using-the-betas Internet can emerge. You may think of this as some random preaching; maybe you're right, but if that's the case the software still provides ample opportunities to quell boredom or scratch that programming itch. Examples of clients that could be possible if you so wanted:
- A Terminal Client (Cat has done something like that, in fact)
- An IRC-Look Alike
- A Text-to-Speech Client for the Impared
- One through Pidgin or Trillian
And the plugin potential is even greater:
- Automatic Spam or Troll Detectors (its possible!)
- Automatic Spam or Troll Bots (though I'm not too keen on that myself)
- A "+1" Favourite Marker
- New BBCodes (Tables, Javascripts, and so-on)
- A Quiz Show
For those who really are interested, know that there will be extensive documentation of the following available at VRIM's opensource release:
- Hooks (like those used in WordPress and vBulletin)
- Phrases (as needed for translation)
- Backend Functions and Methods
- Templates (again, vBulletin)
- The Database and Filesystem Structures
- The XML API used for Client Communication
And finally, because I don't particularly want to stop talking, a release date of all this can be expected around June 30th; a week or two later if felt absolutely necessarily, or a week or two earlier if things come together sooner. Users who may express any interest in developing plugins and clients may be granted access several weeks beforehand to the documentation and in some cases codebase, and the full phrases for translation will be presented later this month if any interest is generated.
1 – Cat333Pokémon
