[MUD-Dev] The MLI Project

[Travis Casey]

On Monday, 16 February 98, Coder wrote:

> Quite.  Typically you can rely on the opponents having noticiably slowed
> targetting routines.  Blurring your peripheral vision puts some balance
> back in their favour (not necessarily a Good Thing), as well as tending to
> reward careful and circumspect play ("I don't know if anybody is there,
> cause I can't see it too well, so I'd better be a lot more sneaky...")
> which could be either a Good or Bad Thing.

The only problem I can see with blurring areas of the screen to
simulate blurred peripheral vision is that most people can shift the
point they're focusing their eyes on much faster than most games that
I've experienced allow you to shift your view.  Thus, you're giving
the players a restriction in how they can look at things that they
wouldn't really have if they were "in the game."  If the interface
allows me to change my focal point as fast as I could in RL, then
there's no problem... but in that case, you're no longer really
affecting the player at all.

> The current tendency is to map the non-focus window's colour pallet to a
> shadow set (typically grayed versions of the originals).  It works
> reasonably.  The advantage of keeping the resolution high is that it still
> allows the eyeball to  carefully watch state changes in non-focal windows. 
> We don't have a GUI which moves focus according to eyeball focal point yet
> -- tho I'm sure Playboy's research dept would love to see one.

Even if we did, I have to wonder -- which would take more
computational effort, showing the whole screen in full detail, or
keeping track of the user's eye movements and trying to show only the
portion he/she is looking at in full detail?  In an action game, where
the player may constantly be scanning back and forth look for warning
signs of danger, it might be possible that doing the entire screen in
full detail would turn out to be less work.
--
       |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'   visit the rec.games.design FAQ:
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)       http://www.io.com/~efindel/design.html