[DGD] DGD & Simulations

[Noah Gibbs]

On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Stephen Schmidt wrote:
> On this subject, is there any reason not to use GIF or JPG
> graphics images (small ones) and send those over the binary
> port, instead of jiggering up ASCII screens with ANSI color?

  ASCII graphics can often look better than a tiny graphic blown up to be
big.  And if you leave it small, people often can't see it at these
newfangled high resolutions :-)
  And if you make it big and full-res, you've got the bandwidth and artist
problems that Erwin mentions.

> The obvious reason is that a text-only telnet client can't
> cope with them, but surely it would not be hard to create
> a simple Java applet

  Or use one of the many that already exist.  Pueblo and FireClient are
the two I'm familiar with, and they serve the images through regular web
servers -- a plus in my mind since you have to write and maintain less
code for it.  Essentially they parse a subset of HTML rather than straight
text/telnet.

> The other problem is that images have to be pre-drawn, the
> mud code can't create them on the fly.

  Sure it can.  Compositing.  Pretty much like the text graphics.  You're
right, though, this is harder and uses more CPU time.  You'd probably
want to modify your DGD server to be able to do fast composites in C
instead of LPC as well.

> But then, room
> descriptions have the same problem and we all use those.

  You can dynamically put together room descriptions.  Why not?  Horizon
Station (a Skotos game) does, and has a nifty article about doing so.  You
have to watch that things don't get too uniform, but that's true
regardless.

-- 
angelbob at monkeyspeak.com
See my page of DGD documentation at
"http://phantasmal.sourceforge.net/DGD/"
If you post to the DGD list, you may see yourself there!


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