[MUD-Dev] A new MUD-standard

[Christopher Allen]

Adam Casbarian:

> If I was going to do a semigraphical mud, I'd want real graphics.
> Nothing to compare with real graphic muds, but a library of pictures
> you may be able to download ahead of time and then the tags that are
> output reference them.
>
> Examples of graphics:
>
> Small graphics showing a terrain type. (picture of a meadow, a city, a
> forest)
>
> Graphics based on some optional flag given to mobiles to show a
> picture.  (The picture would show up during combat and/or upon
> entering the room and seeing it.)
>
> Graphics based on some optional room flag or based on exits.
>
> The pictures wouldn't have to be great, but they'd be hopefully worth
> looking at.  Remember Bard's Tale?  Instead of a group table
> dominating the game's screen, imagine a mud's scrolling text.  Cheesy
> animated gif graphics of wargs glaring at you while you fight would be
> hillariously entertaining.

This is what we are doing at Skotos, with a twist. Our two clients (a
Java one for Netscape and ActiveX for IE) resides within a web page,
and can talk back to the web page that it is on using the DOM. This
allows us to have very nice scrolling text with fonts and a smart text
input box, but also take full advantage of all the capabilities that
others have developed for the web. For instance, as players move
around Castle Marrach, the map of where they are changes. We have had
many compliments to how 'pretty' the client is, but all we have done
is take advantage of what can be done to make a web page pretty.

Our next game, Galactic Emperor, will take even more advantage of this
capability. It is even possible to have the client be a single pixel
on the page but constantly changing the graphics (even Flash
animations) on the page on the fly in a dynamic fashion.

There is a price we pay for this capability -- we have to have two
clients, an ActiveX client for the largest number of our customers who
are using IE/PC because the Java client capabilities of IE are
limited, a Java client for our Netscape/Mozilla customers because it
doesn't support ActiveX, and we can't support IE/Mac at all because
both ActiveX/Mac and Java can't talk to the DOM because Microsoft is
determined to keep IE/Mac a second class browser.

-- Christopher Allen

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen                                 Skotos Tech Inc. ..
..                           1512 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
.. <http://www.Skotos.net>               o510/647-2760  f510/647-2761 ..

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