16 May, 2014, quixadhal wrote in the 21st comment:
Votes: 0
Idealiad said:
@quix, how can you say that a text-stream game requires the server to do all the presentation when the extensive customisations of clients like Mushclient, Mudlet, etc. by their players proves otherwise?


They do NOT prove otherwise, in fact, they prove my point. All your customizable clients take the already fully processed text stream and rip it apart using (probably) regular expressions to try and isolate the various bits of data. THEN, they rearrange those bits and present them differently.

When you use a mud client like this, you are doing TWICE the work… the server already had to process everything for presentation to people using simple clients, and now you have to UNDO all that work and REDO it the way you wanted it done.

This is also part of the reason most MUD's refuse to offer any kind of unique interface. If you run a game and already have players, odds are some of them use various MUD clients that work this way. They come, out of the box, able to distinguish some events and structures, but usually require the end user to spend time building regular expressions (or blob matches) to help catch unique things for each particular game. The more unique your MUD becomes, the more work the user has to do to get their client to work right.

Now, if the client and server were using structured data, it's already categorized. You don't need to try and map a message like "Froboz the wizard starts waving his hands in a circle, while a small glowing red pea floats in the air before him." to recognize that a fireball is about to be cast at you. The server probably would have sent that as a "suggested" flavor text, but it would be encased in a packet which also noted that it was the fireball spell, and that it was an enemy telegraph.

If the client was written for the game, that's all taken care of. If not, at least you don't need to write tons of pattern matching code if you want to put that in the "combat events" window, you just see "event-class":"enemy telegraph", and you're done, just like every other non-instant-casting spell.
16 May, 2014, plamzi wrote in the 22nd comment:
Votes: 0
Nathan said:
The moment you throw text out the window, you might as well just be any one of a number of so-so games out there.


The main problem I see with this statement is that it implies games with scrolling text are inherently high-quality, and all other games in which text is not the main course are inherently mediocre.

I wish that were true, but it ain't, and a quick walk through some of the new listings on MUD sites will quickly remind you how much garbage there is out there. But the point is that the quality of a game is not directly proportional to the amount of text it dishes out to its players and the amount of text it demands that they type. There are many ways to skin a cat.

Nathan said:
Hopefully having pretty graphics won't lead to skimping on the quality of descriptive text. Their game has to report status changes somehow.


Now this is a better way of looking at it. I think it's entirely possible to have pretty graphics (in any amount) as well as quality text (in any amount). Any ratio between quality graphics and quality text, coupled with quality mechanics, is likely to result in a quality game. Graphical assets carry implications, but they do not automatically turn a game into garbage :)

Nathan said:
Is the Domdaria inventory and quest box clickable? It looks like it might be or should be.


I do recall there was a quest log in a popup, but it seemed mostly informative. I don't recall a clickable inventory. I think the game is at a pretty early stage though. A lot of the UI elements seem like low-hanging fruit–they display information and don't accept mouse actions.

Idealiad said:
In fact the UI/X in Domdaria is very well thought out from a keyboard-centric perspective. And this may not be the right choice, given mobile, tablets, and so on. But be that as it may, I like the playing experience of the UI much better than a normal mud.


I'm not sure what you mean by "a normal mud" in this comparison because it seems to me that you can point an advanced desktop client at pretty much any mud, and configure your keyboard shortcuts in a way that perfectly suits your preferences. That's exactly what I'm bummed about. He has a chance to shift the paradigm, but instead he's staying pretty safely in mudder / geek waters (cause there are non-geek mudders who don't rely on shortcuts at all). I don't think anyone except veteran mudders with a style like yours would even know (or care) to find out what the keyboard shortcuts are. That's a pretty small sliver of the population.
16 May, 2014, Nathan wrote in the 23rd comment:
Votes: 0
@plamzi
What I was trying to get at is that there are plenty of mediocre non-text games. Frankly, at some point you transition to being one more web based click and point MMO (or whatever you call a multiplayer game that has less than 100-200 players). It would make more sense to me if he wanted to to do something like this to a game that exists and is liked already.

Tangentially, the whole structured data brings us back to protocols for things… If (and only if) there was some standardization here then people could technically adjust any sufficiently flexible mud client to play such a game. Although, aside from MUSHclient and Mudlet I don't know what client would actually support adding on functionality.

@quix Any chance you could summarize (briefly) what those 'tired mechanics' are? Also, at the end of the day if you're making a game, the onus is on you to provide the necessary client modifications if you want people to use those clients with your game.

—–
At the end of the day, not sure what is intended as the goal with this. If you don't have a game in mind, what's the point of writing a hypothetical server/client for it? Why not figure out what the game is and how it should work first? Probably just repeating people, but the point is valid I think.
16 May, 2014, quixadhal wrote in the 24th comment:
Votes: 0
How many would you like?

(1) The minimap scrolling game. Since we have to pretend we like scrolling text streams, we have to re-emit the entire minimap with all the associated markup, and all the associated text wrapping (of the description around it), every time the player moves. Boy, I'm sure glad it's cold today, so all those extra wasted CPU cycles can go to heating the server room!

(2) A single command line input as your only window into the game. It's nice to have that minimap redrawn all the time… would be cool if you could click a location on it to travel there, get info about it, etc… but nope! Must type n;n;n;e;e;open door;n, even when it's on the map staring at you.

(3) Combat messages simplified to stupidity to reduce spam levels. It would be kinda fun if you had a game that would show nice descriptions of enemies coming out of cover, or from dark corners, or rushing into the room in a non-generic way to help their comrades (whom you are slaughtering)… but because it's all scrolling text mixed in with everything else, if you make it more than a handful of repeated words or phrases, nobody will be able to read them anyways.

(4) ANSI color as an embedded tag, rather than as proper meta-data. Some admins might enjoy tossing in random cute colors in the middle of a description, but most probably want to make the same kinds of things be the same color so it helps the poor human pick them out of the sea of scrolling messages. Unfortunately, while it's not hard to code your server to emit color codes for each type of thing, it is somewhat harder to police your builders so they don't sneak ones in that will screw up said categorization.

(5) The joys of parsing and the guess the verb game! Yes, because all input has to be lines of text, most users eventually figure out things like "kill orc" and "open west door with iron key" and even "cast 'fluffy bunny bite' 3.orc". I happen to like command line input, but on the server's end, I really don't want to have to pick everything apart and check every single bit for validity, especially when the user is typing the same stuff over and over again.

If the client did the checking, it could send command packets that remove much of the need for such error checking from the server (which has to process everyone) and keep it in the client (which only has to process one player). Additionally, while the client would still need to parse "kill 3.orc" if the user types it, it could also let the user right-click on the third orc on the display and pick "attack" from the menu… or even see the orc on the minimap/tactical display and do it from there.

To me, this reliance on doing things the way existing clients expect them to be done is limiting. Maybe I could come up with a new text UI paradigm that would work really well with a custom client, and be really clumsy or not doable in streaming text. Maybe you could. But as long as everyone clings to the old way as the ONLY way, neither of us will.

—-

As for the goal… I can't speak for Runter. However, I think both things need to happen. Nobody will adopt a new engine, no matter how clever or well done, unless there's at least ONE solid example game that people find fun. At the same time, if you end up with a good game, others will want to use the technology, and if you didn't design the engine first, good luck seperating game logic code from engine code.
17 May, 2014, Nathan wrote in the 25th comment:
Votes: 0
@quix point taken.

(1) bad.

(2) I don't see why a clickable map is the only suitable solution (these ideas -> http://textgaming.blogspot.com/2011/01/u... seem relevant)

(3) sure, that's a problem, but as long as you aren't trying to do a ton of other things than combat it should be too bad.

(4) Couldn't you set up something "automated" that would handle colorization provided the right cues and double check context somehow? (Instead of relying on builders) A change tracking system could help you keep track of things and keep tabs on what's being done. How can a couple words being a different color in, say, a room description be handled nicely with metadata? The only really nasty thing I've encountered with ANSI color is that it changes the apparent length of the string when you want to see how long it is and requires a little extra care because of it if you're concerned about formatting.

(5) Really you should be able to say 'open <door/direction/?>' and if the exit/door is locked then the game should know what key(s) are required to unlock it and be able to check
that you have them without requiring you to specifically state which one to use. If you had some kind of coordinate or position system the system could guess which orc to attack based on range if you have a melee weapon although if you have a ranged weapon you might have to specify. Spells should have abbreviations and '3.orc' isn't too bad as long as it understands that any kind of orc (assuming you might have more than one kind) should match.
17 May, 2014, Idealiad wrote in the 26th comment:
Votes: 0
plamzi said:
I'm not sure what you mean by "a normal mud" in this comparison because it seems to me that you can point an advanced desktop client at pretty much any mud, and configure your keyboard shortcuts in a way that perfectly suits your preferences. That's exactly what I'm bummed about. He has a chance to shift the paradigm, but instead he's staying pretty safely in mudder / geek waters (cause there are non-geek mudders who don't rely on shortcuts at all). I don't think anyone except veteran mudders with a style like yours would even know (or care) to find out what the keyboard shortcuts are. That's a pretty small sliver of the population.


There are some mouse/touch UI interactions in Domdaria – inventory is draggable for wear/remove, when you do a give you drag items to a give dialog, you click to select rewards in the quest dialog, and so on.

I wouldn't put the keyboard/non-keyboard divide between mudders and graphical game players though. Don't veteran players of graphical PC games/MMOs also use the keyboard extensively for shortcuts and hotkeys?
18 May, 2014, plamzi wrote in the 27th comment:
Votes: 0
Idealiad said:
I wouldn't put the keyboard/non-keyboard divide between mudders and graphical game players though. Don't veteran players of graphical PC games/MMOs also use the keyboard extensively for shortcuts and hotkeys?


Actually, part of my point was that there's a divide between people who would play a scrolling text game, and those who wouldn't, then a separate/independent divide between players who are reliant on keyboard shortcuts and players who are not. If you have a scrolling text game, how likely is it that you would be able to attract players of graphical games on the merits of your keyboard shortcuts?

So, on the one hand, having good keyboard shortcuts is not going to sell the game to a non-mudder. On the other hand, mudders who like using keyboard shortcuts can configure their favorite client to perform better than the Domdaria UI, and point it to hundreds of better games. Again, a tough sell. That was the second part of my point.

Idealiad said:
There are some mouse/touch UI interactions in Domdaria – inventory is draggable for wear/remove, when you do a give you drag items to a give dialog, you click to select rewards in the quest dialog, and so on.


There needs to be a whole lot more of that to convince a non-mudder to stick around. When you fire up the main UI, you just see a text window and a (very) cascading text menu. I played for about 30 min before I even found my inventory…
18 May, 2014, quixadhal wrote in the 28th comment:
Votes: 0
While I haven't looked at any particular example of late, What planzi just described is what I've found pretty typical of MUD's that try to have "modern" clients, and indeed not that far removed from customiztion of a mud client. That is, lots of menus and lists, because that's what's simplest to code in a generic client.

What I would suggest (seriously) is to play a few actual "AAA" MMO's out there. World of Warcraft is the big daddy that everyone's familiar with. Now, imagine the game with the main display replaced by text, but the rest of the UI still working mostly the way it does now. Not just a few buttons and some right-click menus, but really… tab-targeting to switch between various NPC's in the room as your "focus", hotbars that you can drag abilities onto from your skill/spell book, etc.

Players of graphical games also expect things like unit frames and a proper HUD. In a text environment, all they usually get for a HUD is a prompt that shows their hit points and mana. Ideally, you want the list of NPC's in the room to be in a fixed location (window, region, whatever), and for each one, you want to see (at a glance) their health, level, aggro status, and casting bar (showing what spell/abilitiy they are starting to use). If you hover the mouse over that unit frame, you might reasonably expect to see a popup with more detail.

It sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it? Well… it should. You don't think graphical MMO's got millions of players just because of their shiny graphics, do you? A big part of it is making the mechanics easier to work with. If you compare the original Everquest UI to something like WoW, they're miles apart in terms of usability. EQ1, back in the old days, actually reminds me of what the BEST quality MUD clients out there look like.

To me, that's part of the ongoing problem. MUD developers seem to think the server is the whole game, and the client is just an afterthought. The game is what the players experience, and if part of that experience includes the frustration of a primative UI, or having to spend hours setting up regular expression matching to make their MUD client work with your game… you can reasonably expect many potential players to just pass and move on to the next thing.
18 May, 2014, Idealiad wrote in the 29th comment:
Votes: 0
@quix, that's funny, because Domdaria has:

* tab target switching
* hotbars with draggable abilities
* NPCs with aggro status, health and an action bar (granted, it's general, not specific to what they're casting)

@plamzi, keyboard shortcuts won't sell a text game to a graphical game player, but the overall player experience will. For example, if I'm playing Domdaria, I might:

* use the arrow keys to move around the game map
* hit return to chat a bit in the gossip window
* hit tab to switch to a private chat; tab back to gossip
* hit return to go back to movement
* now I see some mobs ahead in the minimap; press number keys to buff
* enter the room, tab to switch to my target, hotkey to attack
* defeat the mob, hit a hotkey to check my quest progress
* get some loot, hit a hotkey to bring up inventory. I can drag stuff around with the mouse. Mouseover to see item stats (granted, mouseover isn't good for a touch UI)

All of which makes playing feel very seamless and contemporary, which are attributes that would attract a graphical game player IMO. Domdaria could improve in several areas though. You can't click on the map to pathfind to a location currently for example.

Given the experience describe above, can you describe to me a step by step play experience using the controls you would prefer to attract graphical game players?
18 May, 2014, plamzi wrote in the 30th comment:
Votes: 0
Idealiad said:
All of which makes playing feel very seamless and contemporary, which are attributes that would attract a graphical game player IMO. Domdaria could improve in several areas though. You can't click on the map to pathfind to a location currently for example.

Given the experience describe above, can you describe to me a step by step play experience using the controls you would prefer to attract graphical game players?


Yeah, I'm afraid it's very simple to describe:

The initial screen loads after creating a character, and there is no obvious thing to do next.
18 May, 2014, Idealiad wrote in the 31st comment:
Votes: 0
What controls would you prefer? Click to move? Gamepad? Oculus?
18 May, 2014, plamzi wrote in the 32nd comment:
Votes: 0
Idealiad said:
What controls would you prefer? Click to move? Gamepad? Oculus?


We're not even talking about controls yet. We're talking about first impressions, and the first moment of confusion. Imagine you fire up a kind of game you've never played before. You set up an account, which you manage to do because it looks just like setting up an account for any website. Then you enter the game, and you're dropped into something that looks like a chatroom. Nothing comes up to tip you off what to do next. You don't know to type 'help', and there's nothing clickable on screen that tells you how you're supposed to play the game.

The obvious next step is a tutorial, which is hard to do well. And even after a great tutorial, you'd be very hard pressed to keep the people who expect a minimum amount of eye candy and straightforward progression before they would even consider a game.

P. S.
If you haven't done this experiment already, try to put someone who has no idea what MUDs are in front of one. Things that to you have been obvious since 1995 are really not obvious at all.
18 May, 2014, quixadhal wrote in the 33rd comment:
Votes: 0
That's why every MMO out there has that annoying newbie tutorial, which always takes a good half hour to run through, even if you've played 300 of them before and know exactly what to do and where to go. Because an actual NEW player doesn't know.

Back when many of us started playing MUD's, they were popular and many of our friends played them. Even if your friends didn't, when you logged in there were dozens of other people around. So, even if there wasn't a tutorial, and it wasn't obvious that typing "n" would make you walk out the north exit, after a bit of trial and error you could probably figure out how to get the basic help screen, and perhaps also type "say How the *@&$ do I move?"

Today's true newbies though, aren't used to typing anything. They grew up with windows and facebook games, and are used to being told what to do, and how to follow the bouncing quest arrows.

I would be tempted to actually follow WoW's ideas about quest NPC's and have them in your tab target list (or perhaps have a list of friendlies and another list of attackables), with the now classic exclaimation point or question mark quest indicators.

But in any case, the first thing on your screen when you log in should be a "type this to bring up helpful information" message. :)
19 May, 2014, Ssolvarain wrote in the 34th comment:
Votes: 0
Quite a few muds will just drop you in the middle of the main city with no further explanation.

I didn't stick around to find out.
19 May, 2014, quixadhal wrote in the 35th comment:
Votes: 0
Oh, don't mistake my suggestion for wanting a "mud school" or other such nonsense. I'm all about having players learn by doing, and putting them in a real starting city where they're going to be for a while gives them added attachment to the game, as well as making it easier to bypass newbie material for alts. However, TELLING them how to play, and offering them a whole set of "newbie" quests to teach them the layout of the game world, how to interact with it, and gently introduce combat, XP, selling items, etc… that's a good thing.

I've long advocated starting players in the middle of a big city where they'll find content for a great many levels, and where high level players STILL have to come back to do things. It keeps the players together, where they can help each other and where the newcomers can ask questions. Pushing the newbies off into "mud school" just splits everyone up and makes it feel like a boring single player game. World of Warcraft can get away with it, because they have 8 million subscribers, and even on a slow day, you'll likely find people making new alts at any time, in any given newbie zone.
19 May, 2014, Runter wrote in the 36th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
What I would suggest (seriously) is to play a few actual "AAA" MMO's out there. World of Warcraft is the big daddy that everyone's familiar with. Now, imagine the game with the main display replaced by text, but the rest of the UI still working mostly the way it does now. Not just a few buttons and some right-click menus, but really… tab-targeting to switch between various NPC's in the room as your "focus", hotbars that you can drag abilities onto from your skill/spell book, etc.


That pretty well sums up how I feel.

I mean, I think you need to also present those mechanics well and it has to be a primary way to play the game. I think too many admins only build it out as far as to use it as a marketing tool to try to give newbies an easy way to start playing the game.

I disagree with that approach because I think if you're not building it as the primary interface to play the game then the interface is very unlikely to be good enough to attract and keep new players. Also, it's a bit of a bait and switch if later you find out to really be effective in the game you need to download a mud client and type out things.

I personally feel the best mix is good keybindings with a good interface to do everything with mouse pointer.
20.0/36