#145 RIP 2.x and 3.x Missing Features

[Michael J. Ryan]

I've been working on (re)construction of RIPScrip 3.x specifcations from available sources, including inspecting the RIPtel executable and help files. I'm attaching a markdown file laying out the features that are defined, but unimplemented that the agent detected while I was working on this.

[Michael J. Ryan]

Details: https://github.com/bbs-land/remote-imaging-protocol/blob/main/version/3.x/ripscrip/README.md

[Stephen James Hurd]

This is amazing, thank-you for doing this. This is exactly the work I've decided to not to over and over through the years.

By far the biggest issue I've never resolved is the terrible backward-compatibility hacks that were in v2/v3 and how/if to implement them. There's a huge corpus of v1.54 "stuff" that simple never works properly in v3, but there's also some existing v3 art that makes use of v1.54 things in a mixed-mode setting, requiring things to violate the specification in specific ways.

[Michael J. Ryan]

Yeah... it's kind of a mixed mess... I think I've finally got a solid grasp of how the virtual canvas (world coordinate frame) works, but not really the viewports yet... I just started gathering what I could find (an old 2.0-alpha4 spec) and some extracted implementation details from riptel and syncterm. I'm trying to find a working RIPTerm 2.2/2.3 installer so I can maybe clarify when some of the features listed in 3 were actually added.

It's gotten surprisingly hard to find these older software packages. Not to mention, it would be really nice to get a RIPaint 2.x/3.x to be able to use. I literally just found out that Hawk Hubbard died a couple years ago (Acid, BlackFlag, Piranha) who was really championing a RIP resurgence for a while.

There's also a dated discussion on releasing some of the Telegrafix source from a bit over a year ago with no followup at all.