Talk:ImagiNation Network

More content

well im still looking for more content for this page and the pages for the games... if you have any screen shots or other information please update the page or if you dont want to post it here tell us at the Faux Inn Forums and we can post it for you

Pricing

I remember the pricing was around 20 to 40 dollars for unlimited service the time AT&T was running the INN network. The surcharge that is mentioned in this section was mostly if you used a non-prefered numbered, which was the 1800 number. Any other number it was okay, and you were charged a flat fee/rate for unlimited access. Therefore, that section is wrong.

I remember I liked the dungeon game the best. It was first person and I could party up and explorer dungeons with other players. --71.103.86.249 (talk) 16:17, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I designed "The Ruins of Cawdor" for TSN (when I started on it) and INN (as it was named when the dungeon game shipped). I worked for TSN/INN/WorldPlay as the Bridge/RPG designer/programmer from April 1993 until November 1997 (when the first layoff hit) and my wife (Cynthia Turner, not mentioned below) was a systems programmer for TSN from 11/91 until the big layoffs in 2/1998. Bob Heitman was her boss for about a week before leaving. Gary Butts was her boss for most of that time, and Matthew George was in charge of the systems programmers from 1993 until the end. Stuart Moulder was my producer until he left for Microsoft in 1994 or so.

I'm 99% sure that when ATT owned us and we broke even our pricing was $12.95/month flat rate; I have an old copy of "Imaginings" (our newsletter; I named it) with a preview interview with me about Cawdor and $12.95 is the price, but I don't expect to be home until March and won't be able to verify it until then. Premium pricing only applied if you had to call the 800 number to get online. Then it went to $2/hour flat rate, and we lost a bunch of users.

RFAronson (talk) 22:41, 7 January 2009 (UTC) Richard Aronson, aka INNDinky

Manual

Does anyone know where I can find a copy of the "Manual" that is cited throughout this page? If someone can point me in the right direction (maybe a link on the article page?), that would be great! Thanks.

Protocol

I removed the "Protocol" section of this page. It described a very small aspect of the network in fine detail, without any explanation of what this had to do with anything; it's irrelevant without a more general description of the system behind the network. It really didn't fit with this article. I'll copy the removed section below for future reference. - Brian Kendig 15:26, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

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The protocol was a simple stop-and-wait protocol with explicit acknowledgment of packets. Packets had a start marker, a sequence number, a 16-bit CRC, the data, and a stop marker. If the start or stop marker occurred within the data, it had to be escaped. All good packets received in the proper order were acknowledged. Any packet out of sequence cause a NAK for the missing packets that came before it. Any packet with a bad CRC also got a NAK. If a NAK was received, or an ACK did not occur within a reasonable amount of time, the packet was retransmitted.

We later moved to a sliding window version of the same protocol to cut down on the number of ACKs we had to send. Didn't change the packet format, but it did cut back on retransmissions.

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The "protocol" section had appeared on the page again, so I removed it. I agree with Brian Kendig; the information is extraneous and not neccesary for an encyclopedia entry. FarFromHomeFish 09:33, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

Continuing clean-up of article

The article is confusingly written, constantly referring to a manual which most people won't have access to. An effort should be made to revamp this article in its entirety, adding actual information, as opposed to simple lists of the games one could play. I've rewritten the opening section, added a sidebar, and started a 'history' section. Let's tidy up this article; if the quality is high enough, this page may be a canidate for a featured article in the future. --FarFromHomeFish 09:37, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

Remove link to INN newsgroup?

The newsgroup for INN (located at alt.online-service.imagination (on Google)) is only spam these days. While it once might have had some interesting material on it, it now has nothing to add to any discussion save those about 'free cash' and 'bigger boobs'. Unless there's any dissent, I'll go ahead and remove the link on 06/30/06. --FarFromHomeFish 14:16, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Additional fees & restrictions

I vaguely remember that, while the clubhouse worked ont he regular subscription plan, sierraworld and Larryland either required additional costs or separate subscriptions. I also believe that Larryland was restricted to 18+. Since I was young at the time that I was a user, and it's been so long, I don't remember, but if anyone can verify this, it might be worth adding.

Risqué?

So there were parts of the network which were removed because of their content? Which parts would that be? It's not explained enough, I think.--164.77.106.168 19:38, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

More trivia...

What, you mean 'LarryLand'? I think a lot of people did go a little far by today's 'netiquette' standards, but heck, the 'World Wide Web' as an open platform was just a twinkle in Al Gore's eyes....

Anyhoo, if I remember right, TSN worked on SprintNet, it was 'Large Model SCI', and the servers ran in 32 bit extended mode DOS. Compiled with Watcom C, and its horrid 'debugger'.

There was a big party when we finally made enough money to pay the 'phone bill'. You gotta remember, in those days, this ate bandwidth, and you PAID DEARLY FOR IT. Especially to have it imported all the way up the mountain.

The TSN games were all peer-to-peer. The server had minimal logic to make 'groups' and rebroadcast things from one node to the others in the group, and that was more or less the basis for everything but the bulletin boards and email.

Initially, there was no security at all, but people began reverse-engineering things and causing problems, not least of which was the 'debug' flag, which (once found) would allow you to enable all the debug things, like setting the die rolls in Backgammon.

Ken Williams called it a 'Pit I threw money into', but I may be mangling that quote. He sold it to AT&T, and he personally made a ton of money off it, so mission accomplished from his perspective.

It only made money as an 'investment', never made any money on its own.

Heedless of the red ink, AT&T poured money into it like, well, some sort of big, leaky ocean.

They split 'ImagiNation' into two parts. One in Burlingame, CA, the original part in Oakhurst, CA. It cost diddly/squat to maintain office space and pay people in Oakhurst, but they wanted to operate in the Bay Area, where the money could shoot out AT&T like a bad Mexican meal. They began work on Rusty Dawe's 3D social 'Cyberpark'.

Eventually, AT&T discovered it was indeed a hole to throw money into, and sold it to AOL.

AOL wanted to run an online gaming service, so they renamed it 'WorldPlay'.

They had us hack the server and front-end for Cyberpark, stripping the 3D engine out and making a sort-of TSN-like thing under Windows in C/C++.

Then they pulled the plug on the old DOS/TSN games requiring an AOL login to play. There were tears.

We began pouring limitless time and effort into maintaining and extending the C++ code. We spent a lot of time 'testing' third party games that didn't work well.

Eventually, some of those 'third parties' sued AOL, claiming they would be competing with them by making games themselves through WorldPlay, and have an unfair advantage.

AOL eventually killed Worldplay. It was still playable, but you had to know the exact path to it. It wasn't on the top-level menus anywhere to be found.

Some of the remaining people spawned off to a deal with EA to work on some sort of MMORPG. EA eventually killed that, too.

1990 or so to 1993 Jeff Stephenson, Bob Heitman, Dave Slayback, others I never encountered.

Jeff Stephenson left SOL, Bob Heitman became the head of TSN when it was spawned of from Sierra On-Line.

Programmers: James Spellman, Dave Mace, Steve Nichols, Dave Eaton, Conan Brink, Dave Brooks, Steve Luzietti, Craig Allen

Artists: Eric Apel, Dianna Wilson

Then when AT&T more or less took over, there were too many names to remember. I'm bad with names, anyway.

Fair use rationale for Image:FAUX INN champ.gif

Image:FAUX INN champ.gif is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot 07:28, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Current Redirection to Sierra Entertainment | 1990s

I feel like this redirecting to the 1990s Section of Sierra Entertainment's Wikipedia Article isn't right. INN was a vital part of Sierra On-Line's presence during the 1990s, and giving it a direction to something where only a small amount of information relates to the topic is a bit of an injustice. Christhecoolboy (talk) 05:29, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

At least it is very confusing because it is hard to find anything related to ImagiNation Network by following the redirection. Looking at [[1]] was more helpful for me. --MasterLee (talk) 09:43, 29 August 2023 (UTC)