[MUD-Dev] "The client is in the hands of the enemy"

[Kevin Littlejohn]

>>> "Schubert, Damion" wrote
> Raph Koster wrote: 
> > And on that note, my friends over at Wombat Games are about 
> > to give it a
> > serious whack:
> > 
> > http://www.darkzion.com
> > http://dzvault.ign.com
> > 
> 
> One of the more interesting FAQs I've seen, they mention that they
> are going to expose some of their client's innards to the players
> for modification, mostly through Python scripts.  Thoughts?
> 
> --damion

Yeah, I'm really interested to see that ;)

There's no reason this can't be done - the basic thing to remember when
you're providing client-end abilities is that you can't trust them.  So
provide the client with a way to do funky scripting things, but never give
the client more info than they should reasonably have, and never ask the
client to work something out for you.

I'd expect that their scripting would allow you to write stuff that reacts
to events in the world around you - someone says 'hi' near you, you say
'hi' back (or probably more usefully, something attacks you, you fire off
x, y, then z attacks, unless they're armoured, in which case you start with
z, etc).

In some ways, it's accepting the inevitable - witness UO's struggle against
the various little 'extra' programs people created than provide auto-
whatever features (I think it was an improved inventory and targetting
system or somesuch?).  Give people the scripting interface, accept they're
going to use it, and build accordingly.

Wombat people, any clues on how far the scripting can reach into the client/
engine, or pointers toward useable modules etc?  Can we import httplib and
build a web browser into the client that triggers on any spoken URLs, or is
it all restricted to particular objects and methods?

KevinL
(Who believes the people who know best what sort of interface they want
are the people using the thing, so why not give them the features to re-do
as much of the interface in their own manner as possible?)



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