AIM SDK available!

Unfortunately, the DLL is a COM object and from what I've read there's a problem getting bmax to play with those. I don't know anything about how all that works but I'm under the impression we could get the two to interact through some kind of wrapper?

If I'm not the only one excited about the prospect of tapping into the AIM network (for turn based games over IM and who knows what else) maybe we can put together a bmax wrapper we can all use.

Any thoughts?

There's probably some clause in the license agreement regarding commercial use and the like. I'd check it out before starting on anything, at the least.

As for COM, well, I can't offer a lot of advice regarding that, but I think the D3D9 stuff is via COM, and BMax has a module for that already.

I think in order to extern the classes you have to extend them from the Pub.Win32 IUnknown class.

Well, that's my thoughts, anyways. The turn based idea is neat, hope there isn't any annoying clause in the SDK forbidding something that would be derived from.

The usage agreement actually lets you do a ton, which is why this is exciting. The news article seems to think it's restrictive, but 250,000 connections a day sound pretty damn resonable to me!

"There are a number of restrictions, however. Not least of which is the fact that it's only free to use in consumer applications. If a company wanted to build AIM into an enterprise application, they will have to take out a license with AOL.

In the consumer space, if an application built with the Open AIM toolkit is being used for more than 250,000 logins per day, or over two million per month, then the developer will have to seek out a commercial license with AOL.

There's also a blanket ban on "multi-headed" IM clients, according to Odell. You couldn't legally use Open AIM to make a client that connects to both AIM and MSN Messenger or Google Talk networks, for example."

get started at http://developer.aim.com/