I spent many hours hogging the phone line to play btech 3056 back in high school. It was so cool talking to people all over the world. I wasn't very good at the actual game, however. I do remember encountering a bug where I was placed on a level-4 high building and I couldn't get off of it because my mech wouldn't let me intentionally fall.
There were several, all based off of the same live action map/cockpit/etc code.
The granddaddy was 3025, followed. T 3056 - these were attenpting to portray the entire BT universe. So you’d sign up, join a faction, be assigned to a unit, train with your peers, and eventually go off to fight (though I don’t think either ever reached that point).
World level scenario based spinoffs started to appear. Planet level battles between multiple factions. Same deal as above except you would leave base with your unit to a shared hex map and could encounter other opponents.
All in all a much truer experience to TT than the MW games, but less so than Megamek
Wow, I spent many hours on those Battletech Muds. It did have a cool realtime battle system but the faction vs faction wars never happened as far as I remember. There were several offshoots, including some that did 24/7 "live" battles that focused on one planet which was much more scalable. Organizing a scouting expedition was pretty fun. There was a Solaris world too. I ran the Kurita mechwarrior school for a while, doing new pilot training, and I was one of the people who could log in to the TK faction leader account. But then I graduated and got a job haha.
oh hey I probably remember you as I do kind of remember knowing that the head trainer was TK!
I multi-factioned for a while (shame shame!) and had a low level character in the DC. The way you all did mechwarrior training was so much more hardcore than all the other IS factions (never played as clan). It was also the one major faction where I never even came close to getting a character into their SpecOps unit(s), not sure if you all realized how much better you were than everyone else skill-wise lol.
Eventually I wound up in charge of Marik and that ended all the time I had for multi-factioning.
I nearly failed out of school a few times because of 3055! And over time I worked my way to be a faction leader for one of the IS houses. That was basically like working a full time job but obviously no pay. Which wasn’t great as someone who already wasn’t spending enough time on schoolwork
SLAX is great, unfortunately it was released a bit too late.
XML world is full of ugly standards and failed contenders. None remembers RelaxNG. But had reacher expressive power than XMLSchema and a human-readable syntax.
I just leaned about EXI as it's being used on a project I work on. It's quite amazingly fast and small! It is a binary representation of the xml stream. It can compress quite small if you have an xmlschema to go with your xml.
I was curious about how it is implemented and I found the spec easy to read and quite elegant:
https://www.w3.org/TR/exi/
There were a few chips that supported directly executing JVM bytecodes. I'm not sure why it didn't take off, but I think it is generally more performant to JIT compile hotspots to native code.
