[MUD-Dev] The MLI Project

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 23 Feb 1998 10:15:47 PST8PDT 
Chris Gray<cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA> wrote:

> [Chris L:] :

>> Bubba may see a normal room lit by a guttering candle, but Boffo
>> with his ultra-sonic echo-location and near total myopia outside of
>> the infra-red band is nearly blinded by the heat flaring off the
>> candle and searing his retinas, buthas an utterly detailed
>> awareness of the spatial characteristics of the room.

>> Want something a little more "normal".  Boffo now has
>> "magic-vision" which displays the magical potentials of all objects
>> in such strength and overwhelming detail that their mere visual
>> characteristics are effectively lost.

> It's likely no surprise that it would be difficult to accurately
> show a sense that human's don't really have.

True.  There are variations which can be done to attempt to convey a
similar impression to that intended.  Colour pallate rotates of the
affected items, dark/light filters, strobe effects, and LOD control
are somme possible methods for the visual effects.

> This suggests, however, that having multiple graphics output windows
> might be interesting. That way, you could show a magical field
> strength, as seen by Boffo, as well as his infra-red view. Similar
> to previous discussions as to focal point, you could choose one of
> the window's to be clearly redrawn, while the other is less so,
> because the player does not have Boffo concentrating on that aspect.

Exactly.  My tendency would be to use window Z-order as the order of
focal concentration.  THus the top of the Z-order would (presumably)
be receiving the majority of his attention, and the bottom the least.
Where this gets interesting is that this is a bidirectional system.
Not only can the human player control his own Z-oder in represetnation
of his character's order of concetration, but the game can dynamically
alter the Z-order: eg Bubba is concentrating on his magical
awarenesses when suddenly a 50,000 candle light suddenly starts
strobing directly into his eyes.  The client immediately drops the
magic window to the bottom of the Z-order (possibly with reduced or
absent detail) and puts the visual window on top as that signal is now
dominating Bubba's sensorium.

I could also see using transparency effects where the client window is
essentially a formed of a stack of transparent layers, one layer per
sense, with the other of senses being dynamically variant (player and
server controlled), and the resulting image on the client window being
an order-weighted sum of all the client windows.  

This has the advantage of losing the multitude of windows (espensive
on screeen real-estate) as well as the usability factor of constantly
switching among several windows.  The dis-advantage is loss of detail 
and distinct representation.  The gain is that you are back to a
single interface.

Problem:  How to represent echo location?  Wire frame outlines?

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...