Dec 13, 2017, 7:45 PM

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Let's start going through actual UI/UX exercises and proposals.

I’m with @meg that I’m a bit exhausted trying to justify modernizing 30-year-old technology. But I will indulge with one little example:

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Consider the UI of such a game where you have a widget for every way to communicate on a MUSH. You would have to have a popup window (or whatever your UI solution is) for:

Paging - Posing (including: emote, pose, and say) - OOC talk - Places talk (including tt, ttooc, ttpose, et al.) - BBoards - IC Phones, Messengers, Missives, and whatever else your game has - Channels

It makes zero sense to do all those things separately in a web client.

  • Pages/Channels/Mail become Chat like Discord/Slack/etc. One’s just public and the other two are private.
  • Posing/OOC talk/Places are all just different ways to Add to a Scene.
  • BBoards become a Forum.
  • Grid/movement would be gone. Choosing/changing location is just an integral part of conducting a scene.

That's what I meant when I talked about a paradigm shift instead of just slapping a web UI onto the current MUSH commands.

As for the UX? You’ll probably want a chat window at the bottom/side of your screen at all times because that's so important. Forum and Scene are things you would use separate tabs for depending on what you felt like dealing with.

And oh-by-the-way nothing stops you from having several tabs for different scenes just as you’d have different windows open in your web client. Difference is - you can do multiple scenes with the same character. No more spoofing or silly OOC puppet nonsense. So many clunky things that we're required to do because of the telnet client restrictions just fall away.

@tat said in Alternative Formats to MU:

And I'm pretty sure that there's lots of room for improvement on what Ares has so far, even. Helpful error messages, tips and hints, auto-calculators, ALL KINDS OF THINGS.

Oh yeah. The current CG is lame compared to what you can do with a responsive javascript framework (which is what I’m working on). Yet even that lame-o web version is a gazillion times easier than doing it in-game.