[MUD-Dev] Re: clients anyone?...

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 11 Aug 1998 19:06:44 +0100 (BST) 
Andrew Wilson<andrew at aaaaaaaa.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi, there's been little talk about clients and how they integrate
> with servers.  I've seen a little about ansi colour codes in text
> and Erik mentioned TWin's approach to building windowing
> applications that interface with mud internals.  But apart from
> that, um nothing...

> I think this is odd, because I believe that clients are as
> important as servers.  But then I would think that wouldn't I...

Given TkMOO (which I've just been working thru), yes.  I'm also
quite impressed.  For those unaware of this tool, see:
http://www.cm.cf.ac.uk/User/Andrew.Wilson/tkMOO-light/).

> Tile based projects like UO and Furcadia and emerging RPG+Quake
> stuff represent one facet of client technology, funky pictures and
> a gaming feel with the graphics being the prime purpose of the
> exercise.

Having worked thru and played with TkMOO for about an hour, why do
you consider tile-based interfaces to be contradictory with the more
representative view of TkMOO?  In essence isn't it really just a
specific presentation of the world data set, one which a plugin or
similar could intercept and present differently?

> Stuff like TWin, AstroVR, Jupiter, Supernova come from a desire
> not so much to play games but to provide tools that let people do
> work.  These are groupware applications with an integral realtime
> communications aspect, more than just email.  Chat is common to
> all of these though some also have video and audio capabilities.

<nod>

Its also worth noting that porn formed a very large faction of the
early CuSeeMe adopters.

> For some examples of the applications you can build here are a
> couple of gadgets I've been working on recently...

>     I've got a crab (an NPC) at Waterpoint.  When you speak to him
> your message is passed, via a link through my connected client, to
> a PERL script sitting on my home UNIX machine.  The script
> performs an ELIZA transformation on the message and returns a
> reply which the crab then speaks.  Presto, talking crab.  When I'm
> not connected, and the link can't be made then the crab recovers
> by merely insulting the speaker.  The crab is grumpy you see.

<ponder>

There have been various discussions here of having ultimately
decentralised servers where individual client machines conspired
together to present the apparency of a single cohesive world, and
where client disconnects were analagous to part of the world falling
out of existance (or into a degraded level of existance resistant to
state changes (cf cdfs and other other low grade mirror
technologies)).  I see this as essentially a step in the same
direction, except that it makes the __intelligence__ distributed as
versus the world fact, and thus allows highly localised control of
world-aspects pertaining to specific players, especially as they
relate to persistance.

The fact of the crab's existance is never in question.  The
behaviour and the value of the crab is entirely tied to the player
state.

Cute.

> Navigating on muds is always tricky...

Its possibly the nastiest aspect when considered from a global
perspective as it defines not only how a player knows what his
current motion possibilities are and how he takes advantage of them, 
but also how a player moves from one location to a possibly distant
other location and how he knows how to get there as well as how he
actually gets there.

>     Some notes on developing the navigation widgets:
> http://www.cm.cf.ac.uk/User/Andrew.Wilson/rose_who/

I like.  <bow>

--
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...