[MUD-Dev] Re: Mud websites

[Matt Chatterley]

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On 23-Jun-98 Chris Gray wrote:
> [J C Lawrence:]
> 
>  >I was so bold as to ask several users of Utne's web boards.  Two also
>  >reported them as painful to use, but justified by the friends and
>  >contacts they'd made there.  Four had never used anything else and
>  >considered email to be "difficult and confusing".
> 
> I think we are in a time of transition, from the basic text interface
> to something with more capabilities. I can only hope the tool builders
> keep the poor user firmly in mind, however. There is a discussion
> going on in 'comp.arch' (computer architecture) right now about whether
> news articles should be in HTML or not. I tried newsreading in
> Netscape for a while (very spammy groups, but with lots of pictures),
> and found it very dissatisfying - automatic stuff just about drove
> me crazy - I got real tired of clicking 'cancel' on the requests about
> sending email to commercial sites! I'll stick to 'gnus' inside Gnu
> emacs, where everything works with a keystroke. Similarly, I'll stick
> to a simple text-only email interface that I can understand, and which
> presents the text in a font and colours that *I* have chosen for
> readability.

Brings up a mildly interesting point on UIs - assuming that it is entirely key
controlled (thats not important at this point); by how much do you function on
memory, ie, to what extent would you be confused if your UI changed while you
worked?

I'm currently investigating a project whereby the client would 'represent' the
character in some way (for instance, if you pick up a hand-held scanning unit,
a scanner window appears on your desktop while you are using it), and so on.

This seems to have some ups, and some downs - on the up side, this 'literal'
representation of equipment, and equipment management allows a very detailed UI
(the game is probably going to be graphical in nature), but on the down side,
it does mean that the UI changes based on what you are actually using (or
doing), which could potentially be VERY confusing..

- -- 
        -Matt Chatterley
        http://user.itl.net/~neddy/
"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.." -John Lennon (Imagine)

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