Subject: Re: MOO clients for Windows?

From: "The Horror, The Horror" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 13:56:00 -0800

This sounds like a fabulous idea. I have been thinking about
a project along those lines here in Santa Cruz. The idea is
to create a graphical 2D VR representation of the town using
a MOO and a graphic client frontend.

The MOO would maintain (small) bitmaps of objects in properties.
The bitmaps would be encoded in ASCII. When a person using a
special client which understands how to decode the bitmaps
and handle the display coordinates connects, a property is
set on their player object ($player.graphic_client). Then,
whenever a description is sent to them, it includes the text
as well as the bitmap. The client displays the bitmaps in one
window on the screen, the text is displayed in another window.

The client would also include a basic draw program for making
bitmaps and doing the encoding into the ASCII representation
so people could set object bit map description properties.

Such a client won't be too much trouble to write for Unix
and X, and the mods to the MOO core DB to support it are minimal.

ccn

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From: [email-masked] (Glen Daniels)
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 14:58:31 -0800

I've also been thinking about this for a while, but haven't had the
time to actually work on it (I don't MOO much, because if I start, I
*know* how much time I'll sink into it).  One thing that it would be
cool to see, in addition to visual displays of objects/rooms, is
visual INTERACTION with MOO entities.

I envision a system much as you describe, where objects with the
graphic_representation property are displayed as bitmaps.  Objects
without encoded bitmaps are displayed as a default image (which is
client-specific, and can be altered at will).  Now, I want to be able
to drag objects in/out of my inventory, or click on them and see a
pop-up menu of actions this object can perform, or move by clicking
exits....  This sort of thing shouldn't be too hard to add, and would
make MOO-vigating much smoother.

Imagine...users on VT100s, Windows machines, palmtops, and whizzy VR
systems with body suits, all interacting in the *same* world, viewing
it at whatever level of detail / graphics they can handle....

		--Gub (DrFunky, infrequent LambdaMOOer)