Hello Victor.
26 Dec 97 23:57, Victor Kemp wrote to Maurice Kinal:
 VK> I take it that OpenDoors is a C door writing library?
Yes it's a library of C functions for BBS's.
 VK> If so then how
 VK> does Maximus know what option the user has selected? Can it pass an
 VK> errorlevel or something to maximus? And did you run a seperate program
 VK> for each menu? what's the purpose of that? It would seem the whole
 VK> system could be run from the 'menufile' line of the main menu because
 VK> after all if you change menus you get that screen clearing thing
 VK> unless there's a way to stop that. It does sound like a nice idea
 VK> especially since I find TheDraw a real pain to use and Ans2Mec/Ans2Bbs
 VK> seem to have a hell or a lot of bugs in them and you have to go and
 VK> manually edit almost any file converted and patch up all the mistakes.
Whoa!!!  Let's see if I can sort all these questions out by just giving you 
an idea of how I handle it.
1)  The user logs into Maximus as usual.  You can have all the usual logon 
screens using MECCA or whatever.
2)  Maximus then passes control via doorway mode to the menus in the same way 
you do a doorgame.  The main menu then starts up.  If you call a submenu the 
program doesn't have to exit but displays a popup menu with options.  If the 
user escapes this submenu the Main Menu is automatically redisplayed etc.  
When the menu calls a program it either swaps itself to the drive and runs 
the appropriate program or exits with an errorlevel depending if you want it 
to come back to the menu after running the external.
3)  When all is done the menus exit to Maximus giving it complete control 
again.  You can exit to Max with errorlevels, whatever you want/need!!!
The beauty with all this is you are able to write whatever programs you 
want/need whatever.  Online message readers/writers, databases, games, 
ANYTHING that you can think of and you are only limited by ANSI, AVATAR, or 
RIP.
Now it is possible to write a complete BBS package but for me I happen to 
like Maximus so I prefer to spend my programming time on utilities for my 
BBS.  My current project is an online Geographical Information System.  If I 
can interest users in it I will write a graphical based terminal (RIP is too 
expensive) to access it.  Mind you I don't have a graphical based terminal so 
I suppose I'll HAVE to write one just to access it myself.  :)
BTW OpenDoors has an echobase in FidoNet, tag = OPENDOORS (go figure ).
Works great with Maximus (doing my best to stay on topic Mr. Moderator)!!!
Maurice
... Flatlanders --- "There can be only fun!"
--- GoldED 2.50+
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