You should be able to tell from the version number that it’s far from done yet.
I spent some time working on the status window, and it now appears to work more-or-less as intended:
There are a handful of issues I know about, and probably a good solid handful that I don’t know about, so feel free to report anything that is broken that you wouldn’t expect to be broken in a partially-done MUD client.
I’m also curious to know what this client would have to do for you to give up your current favorite MUD client, whether it be ZMud, WinTin, tintin++, or some other app. I’ll throw one out there — before I’d be willing to use it as my main client it would have to support aliases, all those extra newlines that show up in the main window would have to go away, and room description formatting would have to be less wonky.
The cool thing about having our own client is that we’re no longer just restricted to 16 colors of ANSI text. We could do 2-D graphics (i.e. the sample tiled map that shows when you first run the app — since we don’t have surface maps yet it won’t do anything, but hey..) We could do any number of colors. We could do anything we have the skills and motivation for.
I don’t at any point plan to make this client mandatory — you should always be able to play with Windows Telnet. It’s just going to be there for those who want the “full experience”. Tinker with it imagine some neat possibilities that I wouldn’t have thought of yet.
You can either click on the link in the sidebar (which will always have the most current version), or you can get it HERE. There are no real instructions, but you’ll get the hang of it. The other dialogs can be shown with the “View” menu.
Aliases, triggers, variables of course, and…
Have the surface map show up in a seperate window, be static (as in not scrolling just gets replaced with every map update), and be updated in real time regardless of whether you move or ‘look.’
Have the group information show up in a seperat window, be static, and be updated in real time regardless of whether you type ‘group.’ Also add coloring for when hp or moves drop below 100% 75% 50% 25%, perhaps even display the %. Again make it static, not scrolling so the names dont move, just the numbers next to the names change.
I’ve tried unsuccessfully to do both of those in zmud, granted I haven’t tried very hard, I’m lazy, I’m not even sure its possible, and zmud documentation blows. I imagine it’d be quite easy to do on your end. Btw, in Duris, you can already get real time map and group updates, its just incredibly spammy and toggleable.
Well, the static display is the whole reason client has separate windows. Not sure what I want to do about realtime updates, will have to think on that a bit.
When I played a lot I had Zmud set up to do almost all of what Tiu suggests. All tells, group talk, say, shout, all communication was captured to a seperate window, the status bar showed me my position, hp and moves. I had a group window that updated when I hit group to show current group information. I had a scan tool that would scan every second and then only report back if there were goodies in the area…also had a timer that counted the seconds between auto saves. I had noticed that the time between autosaves were longer when there were more people on. The shortest time between saves I ever observed was 30 seconds…It became pretty clear that I could gauge the number of total players in the game by the time between saves. Very helpful when solo raiding! However, that is something you probably want to avoid…