Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source
33 points by calvin
33 points by calvin
Oh boy oh boy another historical codebase for Microslop to ruin!
The early web was filled with experimentation. “What if chat rooms looked like comics?” That question sounds wonderfully unreasonable. And yet it was built, shipped, localized into 24 languages, and bundled with Windows 98.
Wonder what model they used for that...
Oh boy oh boy another historical codebase for Microslop to ruin!
I thought you were joking, but..
Alongside the original snapshots, we’ve included a few AI-powered modernization attempts that demonstrate what’s possible
If you don't like slop, here's a fork: https://github.com/theAlexes/comic-chat-deslopped
If you do like slop, here's a fork which has started to port the app to Qt6: https://github.com/codegod100/comic-chat
I loved that program!
In 2006-2008 the small startup I was working at used IRC for internal chat and most people were running Comic Chat. I ran a Windows VM on my Mac purely to use it.
Hilarious stuff.
I have one screenshot preserved from that time, during the development of "alcheMo" j2me to native compiler. (initially for BREW, later ported to iPhone in time for the appstore launch allowing popular Java games such as "Virtual Villagers: A New Home" to be on iPhone)
I also did love it to mess around with. Reading this post also reminded me of a bot someone had running in a few channels I was in. It basically would keep a record of the last x amount of messages and when activated with a trigger command would generate a comic much like the chat client.
I am not sure what the policy is on bots in the lobster irc channel but I'd be tempted to set something like that up there.
Under the hood, Comic Chat was more than a clever skin for IRC. It was able to interpret conversational cues in the text and choose appropriate poses, facial expressions, gestures, and panel layouts.
That's news to me! I had assumed it was more like IRC with user-controlled puppets.
I'm skimming a copy of the SIGGRAPH paper right now. Sounds like pretty basic stuff (e.g., the presence of the substring "IMHO" causes the character to point to themselves), but it's interesting to see all the different details they considered.
This was the first IRC client I used! It spewed control, characters at the start of a line, so a kind person quickly introduced me to mIRC.
I notice a comic.ttf in the repository with no indication its under a license other than the MIT license of the repository. Does this mean that Comic Sans is now distributable under the terms of the MIT license also?
