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

[Andrew Wilson]

Hi,

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

Situational awareness is good.  In fact it's probably mandatory if
you want a successful chat application.  If you want to know who's
online then there are several ways to achieve this: type @who,
eyeball the buddylist, listen to the ambient audio-feed, watch the
little walking people.

You're right, there are any number of ways to present this information,
and each application is going to have a different set of useful
solutions.  If you want to swap ideas then drop QUAKE and go for
ICQ.  If you want to blast reptiles then loose the verbal and get
hold of a weapons-status HUD overlayed on realtime 3d.

I do NOT 'consider tile-based interfaces to be contradictory with
the more representative view of <insert client here>'.  Instead I
consider tile-based clients to be a correct response to the needs
of a given userbase.  If you needed people to think in terms of
living in a 2-1/2d isometric world then you should present the
world in that form if you possibly can.  It's a no-brainer.

    [as an aside.  there's nothing to stop you building a
    Furcadia-looking client out of Tk, if you're really desperate.
    you'd need to rework Tk's braindead 24bit colour-model, wait
    a couple of years for P400s to become the industry standard
    platform and buy some fast 24/7 somewhere.  I'm not interested
    in doing that today.]

> >     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.

Real.

As for distributed worlds, I consider this to be mostly a mindgame.
We already have distributed cooperating heterogeneous systems,
that's how the internet works.  I've read Gibson, didn't Idoru
contain a reference to some mud that owed its existence to the
services provided by the many systems that comprised the whole?
Circles.

> > 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.

Let's say you're just interested in north, south, east, west, up,
down and @quit.  Then things get simple.

Let's say you're interested in 3d coordinate space, well, line-of-sight
is a trivial complication for route-finding algorithms.  It's not
hard, it's just tedious.

Ok, suppose you have some whacked out simulation of character
memory, and your poor little NPC's been zapped by 'Woozies Mind
Eraser'.  The guy is going to have a hard time telling up from
down.  If you want to add some saving-throw code to his route-finding
code to make life difficult for the fellow then go ahead.

The point is that the difficulty is uh, all in the mind.

I took a guess about what you meant by 'global perspective' by the
way.

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

I'm grumpy.  But it's only all in the mind.

> 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...
> 
> -- 
> MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.

Ay.