[MUD-Dev] RP=MUSH/PG=MUD

[Chris Gray]

[Chris L:]
:Another method I didn't mention is making the actual text from the MUD
:point'n'clickable Web/HTML style.  Instead of typing "go door" or
:similar, just click on the word "door" in the description of the
:curent room.

I think this came up before on the list (or the previous list?). I think
I would go for something a bit more generic - just allow a single-click
on a word to enter that word into the command line. Then, you can have
a bunch of command words stuck somewhere in the window, and it just takes
two clicks and either a third click or hitting RETURN to do the command.
I'm gonna have to keep that option in mind. (The problem I see with
explicitly marking "link" words is that you have to go to the trouble
of doing that, and you have to transmit that mark information to the
client, too.)

:Both of these would seem easily approached by making clickable text as
:above.  I could even see drag'n'dropping text blobs to move inventory
:about and such.

That could be getting a big complicated for me. By the time the user has
done the drag'n'drop, the inventory list could be completely different,
which opens up a lot of other issues.

:One idea is above.  Note:  I'd *really* dislike a model where etnering
:a room populated a container in your client with little icons
:representing all the interactable objects in the current room.  Using
:the live/hyper-linked text as above would seem a possible and logical
:address for this -- especially if you didn't denote the majority of
:the "hot" items with colours, underbars etc.

Grin. I don't do that for objects, but I do do it for agents (PC's and
NPC's). The are currently single-colour 16 x 16 "icons" that are super-
imposed over the main graphics image. They don't seem distracting to
me, and I find I've come to rely on them.

:  1) Making your MUD available/accessable to the illiterates of your
:current language/culture.

I don't equate illiterate with keyboard-impaired. My friend is a highly
skilled technical person, and spends lots of time working with computers.
Its just that he does nearly everything with the mouse, and is quite
slow on the keyboard.

:  2) Making your MUD available/accessable to foreign language users,
:either by providing national language support, or a simplified or
:dictionary query-able interface for those with good language skills
:but poor English skills.

When you want to have sort-of natural language input and output like I
do, there are lots more issues. A friend and I have done an Esperanto
version of a tiny sample scenario, and there were some issues that came
up even in that. We didn't even look at trying to make catalogs (Amiga-
speak for internationalization) for the client and server. At one point
I had hacked my server's parsing utilities to make "le, la, les, los"
equivalent to "a, an, the", but I think I commented it out. And then
there are the issues of parsing languages where the verb isn't always
the first word in the sentence. Not too bad if its the last, but if
its somewhere in the middle??

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA