Monday, April 15, 2013

Inside the buildings

The main problem of making some cool graphics of the space inside buildings with the available characters in CP437 is that making empty rooms that look "cool" is simple but putting stuff inside is *very* difficult... (grrr) any ideas?



8 comments:

  1. Give up on telnet and go web-based. I think even the most hardcore telnet stalwarts are seeing it as a burden. Unicode fonts will give you more options.

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  2. Well I think and know you're right. In fact this code base started just like that, with and HTML5 single page application and JSON communication with the server. I just pick the business logic of the game and put a custom telnet server in front. My day job is spent doing business applications (windows based and also web based) and i wanted to go old school for a change! :)

    I will eventually build a web based client (HTML5 with JSON communications) so players can use one or the other. The web client will be, of course, more eye candy.

    Thanks for the feedback I really appreciate it!

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  3. You don't need to go web-based for graphics. Mud clients like MUSHclient and Mudlet already allow you to draw custom graphical interfaces.

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  4. Yes I know and read about the protocols supported and I will be implementing them but my priority is to provide the best experience possible to telnet terminals such as PuTTY, xTerm, etc. Them I will put some eye candy and new stuff with MXP. But i think that opening a new server port and supporting JSON over WebSockets is a must.

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  5. The problem with clients like PuTTY and XTerm is that relatively few players actually use them - most mudders use dedicated mud clients, because of the specialised features they offer for improving the gaming experience (triggers, aliases, compression, gagging, logging, hotkeys, scripting, sound, graphics, etc). So you're going to need to convince them that they'll get a better experience without all those advanced options they've grown used to, and that'll be a hard sell.

    There are various web-based mud clients available (including some that use WebSockets, and connect to existing muds just fine), but they mostly seem to be used by newbies, with experienced players switching to dedicated mud clients.

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  6. I will look into this seriously. what clients do you think I must be supporting in the alpha release? Mudlet, MushClient, Timtim++?

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  7. If you want to focus first on ASCII maps then I'd suggest testing with TinTin++ and WinTin++ - they should support the same sort of interfaces you're using above, but they also offer a lot of mud-specific features.

    If/when you want to offer a graphical interface then I'd suggest looking at MUSHclient and Mudlet. They actually makes it much easier to put stuff in rooms, as you can just draw images over the top of each other.

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