[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface and who the hell is suppo

[Chris Gray]

[Caliban D:]

[Suggests connecting to a couple of MUDs for a while]

I certainly agree with doing that. I did do it a bit, but wasn't impressed
by what I found - I was mostly bored. My main problem, however, is that
of finding the time. There are currently 90 messages in my mailbox, likely
most from this list. That's going to take a couple of hours to go through.
I find it hard to justify spending time on doing things that are boring,
when there are non-boring things that need doing!

:A command interface can certainly be something binary along the lines of
:an ISR, with the actual text or graphic interface handled by the client;
:however, at that point, the text commands or buttons pass out of the
:domain of interface and become of peripheral concern for example
:purposes. You could certainly use something like that to entirely avoid
:the question of usability in the first place, provided sufficient
:facilities are presented for people to build effective clients.

Sorry, I don't follow what you are saying here. Possibly because I have
no idea what the TLA 'ISR' stands for.

:>Do you mean Netscape plugins for your 'plugin port'?

[Explanation of Caliban's idea of a plugin for MUD's deleted]

OK, thanks - I understand what you are getting at better now. There might
be some technical difficulties with this in the server, however. There
could be two sockets associated with a given client, so the server clearly
has to have two slots in its client representation. OK, fine. However,
how does the server choose which socket to send things down? For example,
an NPC moves into the view of the player. Does the server send a text
message through the straight text port, a binary message through the other
port, or both? Does it depend on the capabilities of the client in some
fashion? If so, there needs to be some initial negotiation to establish
those capabilities.

As a simple example, in my system, when a connection is made over the
binary port, no connection is needed on a text port, since the binary
port is essentially a superset of the text-only port. Any text output is
simply wrapped as a text output message, and any input lines are wrapped
as a text-input message. On initial connection, the client sends a
structure to the server which describes its capabilities - can it go into
wizard (programming) mode, can it run an editor, can it do graphics, what
its resolution and colour depth is, etc.

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