looking for help with peer-to-peer drawing chat

Greetings to everyone interested in ivtools,

I hope you've enjoyed the work we've done with ivtools over the past 
ten years:  the preservation and extension of idraw, the evolution of 
Unidraw, and the endless march keeping up with changes to Unix and C++. 
  If you feel like expressing your gratitude with money, the project is 
now set up to receive PayPal donations here:

	http://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=275

But that is not what this e-mail is really about.  What I'm looking for 
is help on the latest extension to ivtools I'm currently working on, a 
drawing chat capability with a peer-to-peer architecture.  At the 
moment I'm looking for programming assistance, but if you have ideas 
about documentation, promotion, etc., please get in touch as well.

This will be a rather unique drawing program.  It will allow you to 
connect your current drawing session to any number of remote drawing 
editors, and allow you to share the same virtual drawing space.  It is 
a peer-to-peer architecture, with no concept of master or slave, and no 
centralized server.  You can paste anything into your drawing editor 
and it will pop up in everybody else's as soon as  possible.  And they 
in turn can make any modification/duplication/deletion they feel 
compelled to as soon as you release it from your current selection.

There are several "groupboards" currently available, primarily 
implemented as "paint" programs inside a web browser using Java.  They 
have no undo, no concept of editing vector graphics, and no efficiency. 
  This program will be a full-up C++ application with direct and 
bare-bones socket communications between each editor.  Think idraw with 
as many virtual video-display/mouse/keyboards you want.  It should be a 
lot of fun to use.

I'm building this within ivtools drawserv, the top-most layer of 
ivtools that already brought everything ivtools had to offer together 
in one place:  command scripting, flipbook multi-frame capability, 
network graphical editing, etc..  In that way all the existing 
applications remain untouched (idraw, drawtool, comdraw, flipbook, 
graphdraw).   At the moment I'm finalizing the necessary networking 
protocol:  establishing connections, negotiating for unique ids, and an 
efficient exclusive selection mechanism that will minimize, if not 
eliminate, editing collisions.

What I could use help with is the transmitting of graphical state via 
the ASCII commands that propagate from editor to editor.  Currently the 
entire graphic state (font, brush, pattern, color) is being sent, but  
only the point list is being interpreted on the remote end.   If you 
draw in color on one end, all you see is black-and-white on the other.

If this sounds like an interesting project to you (technically, 
politically, or artistically), and you have some background/skills in C 
and C++, please get in touch.  Thanks.

Scott Johnston
http://www.ivtools.org



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