Exactly, although I don't think the costs of auto-redrawing the map when a new sight event is announced is so enormous that it is out of the question. The main design choice I have right now with announced events is how often I want to repeat them (especially with sound events since they will be even more common than sight based ones).
You see a bugbear approaching from the north (5 clicks away)
You see a bugbear approaching from the north (4 clicks away) etc

Or
You hear the sounds of battle to the west.
(Repeated with every melee attack while you are in range of the sound)

It could be if you had many creatures moving outside of a mutual pulse. I.e. Ten creatures approaching at various intervals. Which is a real possibility if that's how you represent movement speed.

Well, if you have things moving around once a second, you'd be getting a full redraw each second. If your normal text output is interspersed in that map redrawing, it would become pretty cumbersome, I think. My question was really about if you had considered alternative output channels, like various protocols for sending out-of-band data, that would make this redrawing more reasonable.

Absolutely that is the plan. Truthfully I really only expect players to be using clients capable of handling MSDP (possibly xterm256 colors as well but that isn't quite as big of a sticking point).

You do realise that msdp support is pretty limited, I hope.

Maya/Rudha

Pretty limited is an understatement. Does anything support it other than TinTin++? I know KaVir's plugin GUI Client thing for MUSHClient supports MSDP, but does the actual client without that plugin support it? I know zMUD/CMUD don't support it though.

Dont get me wrong; I like msdp and think more servers and clients should adopt it, but requiring it of players with its paperthin support is probably a poor decision.

Mayay/Rudha

No, MUSHclient doesn't support it out of the box, but it's relatively easy to add.

I find it somewhat sad when cool game ideas are limited because people want to work on every MUD client out there including telnet. :sad:

Rudha, did I misinterpret your earlier post or was there something lost in translation somewhere?

If the choice is TT++ or MUSHclient with plugin or other client who may add support down the road vs a custom client then I'll go with the former. The layout I am planning probably could be completely dumbed down to support every client out there, but that isn't a sacrfice I'm willing to make.

Not sure exactly what you mean by previous post, here. The one about tiles? I guess I just dont see it as as big a thing of technorpgjargon or something as your post sermed to communicate, though perhaps I misread.

Maya/Rudha

I have a branch of TF that supports python, it wouldnt ne hard to write telopts into TF. I wish Zugg would be more cooperative about those kinds things with zmuf/cmud but if wishes were fishes…

Maya/Rudha

I wasn't saying anything was "technorpgjargon"… you phrased your post as a disagreement only to say to me the things I had been saying myself, so I was confused as to what you were disagreeing with. To save you from re-reading posts, my point was that the RL meaning of 'tile' – the one you seem to agree with – is a fairly standard usage of the term. The definition I do not find to be as standard in video games (not board games) is not the one you gave as the normal definition, so it seems to me that there should be agreement here…


That seems like a reasonable approach.

Im just not really understanding where youre coming from then, David, but I wasnt meaning to argue or derail the thread :P

Maya/Rudha

I guess I'm trying to say that based on all of this I don't think you read my posts closely enough before making your post disagreeing with me regarding a point I didn't make. :smile: I was trying to see if I'd misunderstood your post, but I think I didn't; now that that's cleared up, I agree there's no need to dwell on it.

Only two clients supporting something is one more than most professional games have. I don't think its unreasonable to have an official game client for best results.

MUSHclient needs a plugin, TinTin++ needs a script, I believe you can do the same with CMUD and (perhaps) zMUD, and I've seen two or three other clients connect and negotiate it.

Yes you need a plugin, but that would be the case regardless of whether or not the client supported the protocol natively - MSDP just passes the data back and forth, you need a plugin or script to tell the client what to do with the data.

The same if you go for ATCP, GMCP, 102, or whatever else - you will need to write a script or plugin telling the client what to do with the data. Of course with open source clients like TinTin++, MUSHclient or Mudlet you could package up a copy of the client and distribute it along with the plugin/script preinstalled, as if it were a custom client.

If you want to support windows telnet, you could use the VT100 cursor control sequences like Donky is doing. If you're willing to develop your own custom client, I would personally favour a browser client - no downloads mean a lower entry barrier, and you could design a pretty nice interface on-par with browser games.

Adding MSDP support to MUSHclient took me an afternoon, with no prior experience of Lua or MUSHclient plugins, but if anyone else wants it they're welcome to copy my solution

DecafMUD is a (yet to be released) browser-based client with MSDP support.

Given that your concept is non-standard (when it comes to MUDs, at least) you're probably going to want some form of custom client, be it something written from scratch or something similar to what KaVir's done with MUSHClient. As David said earlier, it's always a shame when people have to compromise their ideas to ensure support for the multitudes of MUD clients.

It doesn't work at all for me, and the downloads page does not exist. The former may be because I am behind the great firewall of China.

I haven't tried in IE or Firefox, but the demo version works for me. I assume that the downloads page doesn't work because the client hasn't been released yet.

EDIT: Fixed quote.

It works okayish. We played with it for a bit. Not really fully-featured though, and the version we have doesn't support MXP or MSDP as the page goes on about. I presume that its intended for a future release.

Maya/Rudha