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

[Adam Wiggins]

[Jon A:]
> > I think I've already mentioned my terrible dislike of switching between 
> > mouse and keyboard. ;)
> > 
> 
> Don't you see that this may be an area in which the list _is_ 
> programmer biased?  I am well aware of the dislike of many list 
> members for mice.  It is my experience that this bias does not extend 
> to the general user population.

Well, it's not so much that, it's *switching* "modes".  I use a mouse quite
a bit at work, doing character animations in 3D Studio Max, pixel art in
Animator Studio, touch-up work in Photoshop, and editing maps in our game
itself.  In all these cases I use the normal mouse-pose of one hand on
the keyboard to activate tools and the other on the mouse to actually do
the manipulations.  I do not like, however, moving back and forth between
a console and the mouse.  When I'm programming in MS Developer I turn off
all the menu bars and extraneous buttons for exactly this reason.  It's not
because I hate the mouse, it's because I want to use one kind of interface
at a time.  At home I leave Linux in text mode most of the time, going to
X Windows only when I need to do something specific like use my MIDI sequencer
or possibly if I want to view a web page's graphics with Netscape.

So I would say the design of a graphical mud client needs to consider if it's
possible to do everything in one 'mode'.  As someone already mentioned, I have
trouble imagining how you could do everything one does on a mud with only the
mouse and a few hotkeys.  At best you'd wind up with something similar to
Sierra's Shadow of Yserbius.  More likely you wouldn't want to sacrifice that
much and you'll end up with a console window where you can do everything, plus
a few extra buttons that take up needless space and only really help out
people that don't know the text interface.