Subject: Re: MOO clients for Windows?

From: "J.Watson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1993 04:20:19 -0800

> 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.

I too had a similar idea a few years ago, not in a MUD sense (I couldn't access
them at the time) but for ordinary adventures, you could drag objects about,
perform actions on them without typing. However this last part can take any
puzzle element out of the game, since half the fun is finding out what you can
do with the objects, having a menu infront of you with all the actions on would
spoil the fun.

> 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....

Nice vision, but v. costly, both in storage (Each level of detail has to be
stored), and in time (Each level must be defined, imagine using a VR suit only
to find that every room was a cube with no distinguishing features) plus to
be a builder you would really need to have some for a Graphics interface so
that
you could develop the VR part of the world.

James Watson
Dudley@UWMud

Sex is not the answer.  Sex is the question.  "Yes" is the answer.
        - Swami X

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account
be allowed to do the job.
        - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Army has carried the American ideal to its logical conclusion.  Not only do
they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also
on ability.
        - T Lehrer

ASSEMBLER is a language.  Any language that can take a half-dozen keystrokes
and compile it down to one byte of code is all right in my books.  Though for
the REAL programmer, assembler is a waste of time.  Why use a compiler when you
can code directly into memory through a front panel.

---

From: [email-masked] (Glen Daniels)
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1993 08:32:47 -0800

Sorry for the delay in replying to this...

   Date: 	Wed, 3 Mar 1993 04:20:19 PST
   From: "J.Watson" <[email-masked]>

I just want to be able to see the same things @examine can show you.
There could certainly be "visible" verbs and "hidden" features, it'd
just be nice to have easy access to the visible ones.  I'm mainly
coming at this from the perspective of trying to develop this
technology into a useful *general* shared computing environment
(cyberspace from grass-roots movements up, rather than somehow imposed
from above).  In "puzzle" areas, information hiding is a good thing,
but in many others, you want the environment to be as easy to play
with as possible.

   be a builder you would really need to have some for a Graphics interface so that

Well, the point is not to provide all things to all users, but to
allow a much more broadly shared virtual world.  No matter what kind
of interface I've got, I'd like to be able to participate somehow in
the same "game" everyone else is playing.  The folks who have swoopy
VR suits will be able to design swoopy VR areas, but as long as they
also implement textual descriptions, they can share those areas with
all the less-fortunate with VT100s.  Of course, there may be areas
where people don't choose to take the time to implement a "lowest
common denominator" interface - in that case, a text-only user just
wouldn't be able to enter that region.  Oh, well.  But the other way
still works fine - a text-based area without swoopy graphics
information can still be played with by a user in a VR suit.  It may
look boxy and primitive, but that really depends on how good the VR
clients are - I can think of several ways of allowing hi-power clients
to improve the look of low-tech areas of cyberspace.  And it'd be an
easy thing to get in touch with the builders of a given region and
give them your graphical representation of their area - if they like
it, they could just add it in to the relevant objects.

And as for storage/resources, that's a problem which can be solved by
a reasonable distributed processing setup (which I believe is
essential to this sort of development); you just let the machines with
the huge giga-drives and fast processors deal with the hard stuff.
For instance, maybe someone using a 386 PC as a server has written an
amazingly cool room of some sort.  I write a whizzy graphics version
of their text-only room, and we set up all the graphics on my
superfast RISCstation.  Then if someone with a VR suit walks in, the
386 can still do the processing to handle the dynamics of the room,
but it tells the client to go talk to my machine for rendering
information....

		--Gub