Mm, yes, did I mention I was probably drunk when I posted that?
Now, the speed wouldn't matter because it wouldn't try to be a fast, efficient network. It would be more of a virtual world for 'mirclets', just a bunch of mIRCs connected loosely in a scattered fashion. Once a message/mIRClet is sent, its passed around until it gets to the target.
*rewrites idea a little bit*
Each mIRClet must do the following to be considered "GOOD".
-Call the correct series of aliases to send itself to another machine.
-When it transfers, it uses something kinda like a header, which contains a "MAXLIFE" property - if it doesn't reach a target before maxlife, then it gets killed off.
-Every time its transfered by one relay to another, it adds the ip to the list, probably hashed (so that people don't just get a list of IP's to attack).
The third property would let you automatically assess which is the more efficient mirclet, the smaller the arriving mirclet, the better it was at transferring (It was either lucky, or directly connected to the target computer)
I don't think you'd have to worry about writing your own shortest distance between computers - you just select the code which does it best.
You'd get mirclets that are highly specialized at transferring over short network distances who simply map a static path. You'd get others (with your randomly generated code) that take their 'best guess' and are more general, thus more adaptable.
Damn I need coffee.
mirclet code would be created from a pool of commands kept it in a text file, called with $read(fname.txt,$rand(1,$lines(fname.txt)), and perhaps some text to replace, like <ip>, <string>, <variant> etc for what could be valid input.
Ah hell I've stumbled a little, my mind is not a razor at 2:21PM (Its, like, light outside for some reason... d-a-y-t-i-m-e... never heard of it... )
Anyways, re your thoughts of 'massive coding task'. This is what I'm pushing coding standards and encapsulation in mIRC for. Too long has the attitude of "me me all me" gone forth, we've not seen much in the way of group projects. Its why I wrote a task manager (albiet a very long time ago). Its why I started mear. It so you can sit a coder who isn't very bright down and say "make an alias in mirc return such and such."
I notice you've been doing it too with your string snippets. By chance are we going to see a lot more output like this of yours?
