[MUD-Dev] [bus][des] Anarchy Online and the free MMORPG...

[ceo]

olag at ifi.uio.no wrote:
> Adam M:

>> Which reminds me: the "newbie-only" starting area contains approx
>> 6 quests, one of which is BROKEN and another claims (in story
>> text) it will give you an item (although it doesn't appear in the
>> system messages) but never does.

> Which one? I thought I had done them all. Did you find the
> nano-formulas in the starting-area btw? :-)

The doctor + officer (shoulder-pads quests). Firstly, it's very easy
to be only able to do one of the quests, becuase the triggers fore
the other screw up. It might be that you have to do the two in the
correct order to get both, can't recall.

However, you complete the doctor's quest and she refuses to talk to
you - you have to re-trigger the start of the quest (duplicating it
in your inventory) in order to get permission to talk to her to
finish the quest you've already done.

Very frequently asked by newbies, and 9 times out of 10 no-one
bothered replying that I saw (maybe most people weren't finding it
until after they'd left that area, and you can't return, so ... )

>> You're misunderstanding the situation: it is not the gameworld
>> that is killing the player, it's the GUI.

> I understand what you say, but I am not convinced that the GUI
> should prevent you from doing what you tell the GUI to do. You
> might want to improve the targetting interface, but that is
> another issue.

So, if I make a gui where the keys a, d, f, h, k, x, c, b, n are
movement forwards, backwards, running-forwards, running-backwards,
etc, and put keys s = kill self, g = attack nearest friendly target,
j = attack any target at random (including any dangerous monsters
nearby), then ... you think that's OK, because technically speaking
every mis-type is me telling the game client to do something stupid,
and that's my fault?

A tenet of GUI design is that it should enable and help, not disable
and get in the way.

> If you cast a nuke on yourself... Ok, then you're dead. You should
> be allowed to do it. And you should be allowed to make mistakes,
> just like we do in the physical world (forgetting to put ammo in
> your gun, pressing the wrong button etc).

Bad ammo management is on a whole other level of badness. The
problems I highlighted are far far more damaging not just to the
player but to all teammates too.

>> It's less than 2 years old. It is ridiculous to think that a 2004
>> harddrive is "not good enough" for this kind of task.

> Yes, in theory. I agree.

> But, if your harddrive is fragmented or has slow seek times for
> other reasons then it will become an issue for any process that
> requires scattered data that doesn't fit in memory... Accessing a
> harddrive means a slow-down with a factor in the 1000s.

Maybe. Unlikely though, it's a good, fast, drive which works fine in
plenty of other virtual-mem-thrashing situations, and the places AO
was laid-down *certainly* aren't fragmented (there was tonnes of
never-previously-used freespace for it...).

Adam M
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