On Sun, 30 Jul 2000, Jeremy Maloney wrote:
> [big snip about presentation of the combat]
The presentation and mechanics of this combat system are trivial, but rely
upon the ISO6429 terminal control sequences ("ANSI codes"). Despite the
fact that not everyone has support for such control codes, that's the
least of your problems.
Interacting with the user is of greater concern. Modern TELNET programs
default to line-by-line mode. Mud clients (which typically aren't TELNET
clients) follow suit. The line-oriented nature of the communication is
going to make it trying to make the system practical. Regardless of what
you do presentation or mechanics wise, unless you switch to char-by-char
mode, you're going to force at least two keystrokes for most commands (the
command key plus the ENTER key). This is not well-suited for realtime
combat. Not every Mud client supports TELNET's char-by-char mode and
switching to char-by-char increases bandwidth considerably (the TCP/IP
headers plus 1 byte packets for every character the user types), thus some
users will never be able to compete using a realtime combat system of this
nature.
At this point, it's clearly better to have a client tailored for your
purposes. Then there's little in the way of technical considerations
concerning your client/server. There are restrictions, of course, such as
the portability and availability of your client. Those can be resolved by
using an interpreted language (including those with VMs, such as Java).
(Having said all of that about stuff on-topic, I have to spend a paragraph
to bitch about something many people have been doing increasingly more.
I have said it a hundred times: USE DESCRIPTIVE SUBJECT LINES. It is not
helpful to see, "[Idea] [Code]". That tells us nothing about what your
message is about. Even further, your message had nothing to do with code:
it should go without saying that you shouldn't attach arbitrary tags to
your message's subject. Anyway, it's not difficult to come up with a
subject line that details what you're talking about.)
-dak
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