[MUD-Dev] The MLI Project

[Chris Gray]

[Caliban:]

:The room is rather dark%INFRA% and uniformly cold%INFRA%, with only a
:slight glow spilling over from a light source to the south which%INFRA%
:gives off no discernible light and %INFRA% pulsates slowly.

I admit to be amused here that both of us were able to talk about the
ideas of separate versus combined windows, and it all seemed to make sense.
Even though I was thinking about graphics output windows, and Caliban is
thinking text output windows! Just goes to show that paradigms are often
more general than the original suggester might imagine.

With graphics output, the position of the items in the displays would
correspond, so figuring out which went with which is fairly easy. My
thinking on layering is something like this:

    - display a normal graphics view of what the player sees
    - for an extra sense, there are some options:
	- display a transparent blob over things which are triggering
	    the sense. The size, colour and density of the blob are
	    available to display parameters of the sensed data. A very
	    large and dense blob could effectively be blinding the player
	    to what is responsible for it - an interesting effect.
	- display a numeric value, with an indicator pointing to the
	    center of the location the sense is triggered from. Additional
	    clues, like the size of a bullseye indicator, colour of the
	    text, etc., could be used as visual cues.
    - multiple extra senses could be displayed at once, using variations
	on the above, but too many would definitely get hard to handle.

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