UX: It's time for The Talk

[Groth]

@Derp said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

What, specifically, about it do you think is relic tech from the 90's?
Or, even more helpfully, show us an example of things that you think would work better than what's already out there?

Specifically MushClient was written for the Windows 95 graphics API and is unable to support free sub-windows without being rewritten from scratch to an API that actually supports modern GUI.

A theoretical modern client that has the same kind of scripting support that Mush-client (Lua) has combined with a modern graphics library would allow you create pretty decent game-specific GUI's if you combined it with some new standards for exchanging annotated data. (Like the already existing https://www.gammon.com.au/gmcp )

[Thenomain]

@Groth

I would give my left...I don't know, sock...to get MCP, or even GMCP. I had completely forgotten about it. Let people build their own clients on a metadata standard.

[RnMissionRun]

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Groth

I would give my left...I don't know, sock...to get MCP, or even GMCP. I had completely forgotten about it. Let people build their own clients on a metadata standard.

Meanwhile we've had MXP, Pueblo and MCP (on MUD type games and MUCKS, mainly) for over twenty years and virtually the entire MU* community has ignored them. Another new protocol that no one is going to use, isn't the answer. We're likely stuck with things the way they are now until whatever it is that will eventually replace MUSH type servers, makes an appearance.

[Rook]

Yeah, there seems to be a lot of complexity around MUDs that MUSHes don't use, because MUSHes inherently have 99.99% of the development happening inside the game itself, not in the hardcode like MUDs do. MCP is an attempt to make a unified message bus in a MUD between the client and server, to standardize things, and it seems like it wasn't widely adopted. Likewise, some clients have started to allow SSL connections, to stop employer snooping.

Normal players don't use this stuff.

[Thenomain]

@RnMissionRun

MXP is the other one I was trying to remember.

With all due apologies to those who developed it, Pueblo was not a great idea. The complexity of building a parser around an SGML standard (aka HTML) was too much too soon. I mean, who remembers VML? It wasn't the solution that we needed.

Of course, knowing is only half the battle. The other half is "right place, right time". The clunky RSS Feed, which did not age well, is recently being replaced by JSONFeed. This process took forever, not because nobody was interested but because the spark wasn't there. Lord knows that XML->JSON and visa-versa translation recipes have been out since—I'm guessing—JSON gained any popularity. And since JSON is so much easier to both encode and parse than XML, coders have been picking up JSONFeed as an RSS replacement at an amazing rate.

So sure, there are potential replacements, but we're sitting here saying that if only someone would do something to improve it. Myself included. Either eventually someone will (Faraday in Ares, Ashen-Shugar in Rhost, anyone in Evennia), or they won't.

I will say that one of the things I consider if I'm even going to try to code something is: Who will use this? Crow about Pueblo or MXP as much as you want, it never made it into Mush-user-style clients because nobody convinced us why we'd want it, and to do that someone has to use it.

The point? Something can't just be good, it has to be used.

For those too young to remember, Betamax was far superior than VHS in so many ways, yet VHS won because VHS was used.

Okay, done rambling.

[RnMissionRun]

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@RnMissionRun

Crow about Pueblo or MXP as much as you want, it never made it into Mush-user-style clients because nobody convinced us why we'd want it, and to do that someone has to use it.

The biggest problem with things like MXP is, people would have to switch clients to use it, and trying to get people to use a different client is like trying to sell ice to Eskimos.

Then you have to take into consideration that most of your players won't be using the custom client to get the whiz-bang features anyway, which means you still have to do things the old fashioned way. This leads to wondering why you're bothering with it in the first place, with so little return on the huge investment of time and energy that went into it.

That's what happened with me, at any rate

[SparklesTheClown]

I actually think Pueblo is fun, but the client is just, like, I got enough poses eaten to gain a healthy hatred of it.

[Thenomain]

@RnMissionRun said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@RnMissionRun

Crow about Pueblo or MXP as much as you want, it never made it into Mush-user-style clients because nobody convinced us why we'd want it, and to do that someone has to use it.

The biggest problem with things like MXP is, people would have to switch clients to use it, and trying to get people to use a different client is like trying to sell ice to Eskimos.

It took me about 5 minutes to switch from whatever client I was using to Atlantis. Find me a Mac user who isn't using Atlantis and is waiting impatiently for Atlantis 2: Undersea Boogaloo, and I'll show you someone using the shell.

People have been asking about a newer Windows client for years. Even in this very thread! I bet most of them don't even know what else is out there and relatively modern. Except Potato. Potato is fine, but it's not good.

I'd estimate that two thirds of Potato complaints are about logging, and one third about spawns.

So it's not that people don't want to switch to something new, but why switch to something new when it's worse at your most-used features? Who in the world wants that? (Cough cough Windows 8 cough cough.)

This leads to wondering why you're bothering with it in the first place, with so little return on the huge investment of time and energy that went into it.

I already mentioned this, yes. Why code something that won't be used? There are reasons, and the biggest reason for coders is, "What? Who are you? Yes, yes, whatever, now let me get back to playing with code, BANG ZOOM look at what I can do!"

Let us not forget that this is a hobby.

You can also ask: Why is anyone responding to this thread knowing that what they say will have little effect?

I will leave this one as an exercise for the reader.

[Ganymede]

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I'd estimate that two thirds of Potato complaints are about logging, and one third about spawns.

I like Potato's logging feature. It allows me to log everything that previously occurred in the same window, which means, at the end of my scene, I can use the log command and capture everything that happened before.

It's a bit different than zMUD, which only logged what came after you started.

So, I won't complain there, but I'm a cave-cat when it comes to clients.

[Jim Nanban]

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

You can also ask: Why is anyone responding to this thread knowing that what they say will have little effect?

Because MU* players (myself included) and the internet as a whole are pedantic twits who wouldn't understand a rhetorical question if it bit them in the--

I will leave this one as an exercise for the reader.

I'll see myself out.

[RnMissionRun]

Potato is 'meh'. When he fixes it so that SHIFT-INS (to paste) doesn't also toggle INSERT mode, I'll give it another look In the meantime, it's TF, Atlantis or nothing.

[RnMissionRun]

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

You can also ask: Why is anyone responding to this thread knowing that what they say will have little effect?

We've been talking about this stuff for more than twenty years! Why stop now

[Ganymede]

@RnMissionRun said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

Potato is 'meh'. When he fixes it so that SHIFT-INS (to paste) doesn't also toggle INSERT mode, I'll give it another look

I use the ol' CTRL+C and CTRL+V to copy and paste.

[SparklesTheClown]

What in the world is shift-ins?

[Thenomain]

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

What in the world is shift-ins?

Shift + Insert. They're keys. On the keyboard. Which is a board. With keys on it.

[Jim Nanban]

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

Shift + Insert. They're keys. On the keyboard. Which is a board. With keys on it.

[SparklesTheClown]

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

What in the world is shift-ins?

Shift + Insert. They're keys. On the keyboard. Which is a board. With keys on it.

Why would someone go through all the trouble of typing shift + insert when they can ctrl + c?

[Thenomain]

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

What in the world is shift-ins?

Shift + Insert. They're keys. On the keyboard. Which is a board. With keys on it.

Why would someone go through all the trouble of typing shift + insert when they can ctrl + c?

I would explain in great detail, but as my "explain in great detail" was going to be a link to the very same web page you could look for, you'll have to: a) wait until someone answers, b) download the free and cross-platform Potato Client and find out yourself, or c) Who the heck cares!

[RnMissionRun]

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

What in the world is shift-ins?

Shift + Insert. They're keys. On the keyboard. Which is a board. With keys on it.

Why would someone go through all the trouble of typing shift + insert when they can ctrl + c?

For the same reason that I'm snuggling on the couch with the BF right now, drinking beer and watching Golden Girls reruns on Lifetime. It's how I roll

[SparklesTheClown]

@RnMissionRun I went to a place called Big Gay Ice Cream, and they have rainbow Golden Girls art all over the place.