Posted April 27, 2011
Dear all;
Over the past six months I've been working on a Windows program to allow Age of Wonders players to use the old play by email feature again, but with modern email accounts like GMail, AOL, Windows Live and Yahoo (and it's totally free). The games only work with really old email servers, but with my program they will work on anything. You can still use the manual sending option, but this is a lot of fuss and hassle (in my view) - so the main point of this program is that it gets the automated email sending working again (i.e. no fuss or hassle).
I'm posting here because I haven't actually tested it with the games that come from GOG. I've only tested it on all the original CD versions and also with Shadow Magic from Steam.
So if you would like to help, you would potentially be helping out everyone else who also has the GOG games, let me know and I'll explain what would be involved.
Just so you know, Triumph Studios have tested it, they said they like it and have linked it from their site links page, facebook and twitter pages. So this is a serious project, we also have about 20 - 30 people from the heaven forum who're using it every day.
Anyway, thanks for reading!
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The Age of Wonders games were released in a time where most ISPs provided open SMTP servers, not requiring explicit authentication or any encryption. These days, and since the age of SPAM, those kinds of SMTP servers are rare. The development of SMTP servers over time effectively broke the play by email automatic-send function of the game. Players could still use the manual sending option, to use their own email client, but this involved manual repetitious actions for each game played.
Recently though a group of Age of Wonders fans have been working together to develop an application to restore the automatic send ability. The Age of Wonders Email Wrapper is a lightweight application that is run on the same PC as the game. It works by emulating an open SMTP server and accepting SMTP requests from the game.
When the game sends an email it will connect to the Age of Wonders Email Wrapper, as it would a real server, to send the email. The Wrapper then receives the email and sends it out over the internet using a modern SMTP server specified by the user and with whatever authentication or encryption is necessary.
The Wrapper can also download email games from IMAP and POP3 email accounts. So it essentially encapsulates the entire Email functionality of the game.
---
Demo Video
david dot honess at gmail dot com
Over the past six months I've been working on a Windows program to allow Age of Wonders players to use the old play by email feature again, but with modern email accounts like GMail, AOL, Windows Live and Yahoo (and it's totally free). The games only work with really old email servers, but with my program they will work on anything. You can still use the manual sending option, but this is a lot of fuss and hassle (in my view) - so the main point of this program is that it gets the automated email sending working again (i.e. no fuss or hassle).
I'm posting here because I haven't actually tested it with the games that come from GOG. I've only tested it on all the original CD versions and also with Shadow Magic from Steam.
So if you would like to help, you would potentially be helping out everyone else who also has the GOG games, let me know and I'll explain what would be involved.
Just so you know, Triumph Studios have tested it, they said they like it and have linked it from their site links page, facebook and twitter pages. So this is a serious project, we also have about 20 - 30 people from the heaven forum who're using it every day.
Anyway, thanks for reading!
---
The Age of Wonders games were released in a time where most ISPs provided open SMTP servers, not requiring explicit authentication or any encryption. These days, and since the age of SPAM, those kinds of SMTP servers are rare. The development of SMTP servers over time effectively broke the play by email automatic-send function of the game. Players could still use the manual sending option, to use their own email client, but this involved manual repetitious actions for each game played.
Recently though a group of Age of Wonders fans have been working together to develop an application to restore the automatic send ability. The Age of Wonders Email Wrapper is a lightweight application that is run on the same PC as the game. It works by emulating an open SMTP server and accepting SMTP requests from the game.
When the game sends an email it will connect to the Age of Wonders Email Wrapper, as it would a real server, to send the email. The Wrapper then receives the email and sends it out over the internet using a modern SMTP server specified by the user and with whatever authentication or encryption is necessary.
The Wrapper can also download email games from IMAP and POP3 email accounts. So it essentially encapsulates the entire Email functionality of the game.
---
Demo Video
david dot honess at gmail dot com
Post edited May 03, 2011 by Davespice
