[MUD-Dev] Furcadia improvement (was: Massive Online Gaming magazine)

[Zach Collins {Siege}]

I've split the prior message into two parts so that they can be
handled and titled separately.  My comment on the first part (about
the magazine) should be seen in Mud-Dev soon.

On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Dr. Cat wrote:

> P.S. If anybody cares, my DragonSpeak scripting language is
> finally going to get to become a bit powerful in the next update,
> in addition to very easy to use (as it's been since 1996 already).
> I'm finally putting in variables and some basic text handling
> (which is already programmed and working).  On the other paw, if
> nobody cares...  It's still happening anyway.  Just so you know.

I have found that DragonSpeak is easy to use because it has an
editor; otherwise it is just Assembly for Furcadia maps.  A good
editor (and yours is very good) can do amazing things for the
usability of a language.

However, I think that upgrading the client, perhaps using a
different graphical toolkit, is your best bet for improving the
game's initial experience.  I have a few complaints with it, that I
think are best aired in an open forum, especially since many of them
probably should be covered in any similar MU* client or
single-player game as well.

  1) Neither the client window, nor any of its subpanes, are
  resizeable.  While this means that making hidden zones on a given
  map is easier to do, it also means that the text pane needs a
  "more" function to be readable in many places.  I would suggest a
  'floating panel' approach to this problem, so that every part of
  the GUI can be fixed-size or resizeable as necessary.

  2) There is no pathing.  This means lots of repetitive clicking or
  typing, or holding down a key and risk overshooting one's goal.
  My suggestion would be a simple beeline or a one- to eight-node
  Minotaur's maze, which would be very workable given the small size
  and gridded layout of the maps.  You could even let the user
  specify whether to circle to the left or right of obstacles, if
  you wanted.  Since this is a client-side improvement, you wouldn't
  even have to adjust the server to accomodate pathed clients; just
  let them ask to move in a given direction each cycle, and account
  for conditions normally.

  3) The fonts are okay, but being able to use OS standard fonts, or
  even TrueType fonts, would be better.  Combined with a floating
  resizeable panel (maybe with transparent background), this would
  be much more effective than the current method of simple
  scrollback and constant logging, for keeping track of
  conversations and important messages.  You could even offer the
  user the ability to change the default font colors for the
  different message types, or add multiple panes to sort messages
  into.

  4) This one requires some server-side adjustments: Being able to
  carry more than one object at a time, and to have those objects be
  more useful, would be a massive improvement.  This could mean
  adding inventory tests to DragonSpeak, or altering what tests
  currently exist.  It also means adjusting the GUI to accomodate
  more objects.

These are just my opinions, of course, and I haven't touched the
darn thing in several months, but I think it had to be said.

--
Zach Collins


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