[MUD-Dev] Habbo Hotel...

[Andrew Wilson]

Ola Fosheim =?iso-8859-1?Q?Gr=F8stad?=:
> Andrew Wilson wrote:

>> I couldn't find reference to this in the minimal search I made of
>> the archive so...

>>     http://www.habbohotel.com/

> To me, Habbo has a rather The Palace like feel to it. The pub is a
> fitting metaphor, analogy even. People actually seem to buy
> furniture (graphics) for real money, maybe EC made a blunder
> somewhere in there...

About the 3rd or 4th time I visited some US people found out I was
from the UK and asked if I could send an SMS message to their 'habbo'
(username).  They offered to pay me via PayPal.  There is some desire
to pay for the game, perhaps just to check it out, but receiving
payment is a problem.  The amounts of money you'd charge for a chair
or table are tiny and probably not worth the trouble of using a real
credit-card to do the deal.

SMS messages can be a form of real currency if you own the phone
numbers, and HH also make use of a prepaid kids-debit-card, but few US
visitors would have either of these options, hence the PayPal offer.

Perhaps another form of payment could come with sponsorship as product
placement.  In the Habbo's private room the graphics are much larger
than the main communal areas.  The image of the Habbo is large enough
to hold a company logo.  So you might be able to see Nike or GAP
paying to get their names in the Habbo wardrobe.  Users might even
wish to pay to wear the logoed clothes, they do so in real-life of
course.  How much longer before this is commonplace in games like The
Sims?

>> The client uses 'event propagation' (quoting someone else here, I'd
>> just call it 'text-reordering).

> You cannot expect to gain a whole lot by this given the lag you can
> expect over international networks. Maybe within a one second
> interval, but beyond that, I'd rather get the message at the bottom
> than inserted in the middle, or worse, off the screen. And one
> second is nothing given the time it takes to type a line of text? Or
> did I miss something?

I use a P2/100, old and slow, and the Flash5 client was barely useable
as a chat client.  It looks like the client code is so busy servicing
the continuous stream of network traffic and on-screen animation that
it can only process a couple of characters of typed input per second.
It's an unpleasant experience, but perhaps it's a deliberate ploy to
minimise traffic ;)

The event-propagation thing seems fine if users aren't lots of lines.
The UI provides for about 10 lines of text which auto-scrolls up the
screen.  From experience this is not enough for grown-up chat
conversations.  It also cramped my style a little to be limited to
about 15 words per message.  I ended up doing the old trick of
thinking...

in paragraphs and typing trailing ellipses to signify the continuation
of...

an idea, which would normally be lost by the UI.

Cheers,
Ay.
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