Designing for Mobile
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@carma Client must be able to maintain the connection even when shoved into the background, logging to an external source (ie Dropbox, Google Drive, etc), with readable text in landscape and portrait mode (some people like portrait, I don't know why).
I don't think it matters about the game itself, usually. Most folk can type on a phone keyboard without much issue - depending on the keyboard they use. There's also a... I don't know about stigma, but I certainly roll my eyes if people start blaming being on their phone for slow typing.
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To get around the persistent connection problem @Tinuviel mentioned, you really need a dedicated mobile app. (Not just a web app.)
This is a huge, possibly-insurmountable, challenge for several reasons:
- Most MU servers don't support that kind of interaction; they're designed around telnet connections. The back-end would have to be changed. Unless someone came up with a centralized API, it would lead to different mobile apps for Ares, Evennia, Rhost, etc.
- Even if someone came up with a centralized API for the main game functions, MUSHes are heavily customized. Your mobile app would have to account for that somehow.
If we handwave those challenges away, an ideal mobile MU app would look to apps like Discord and Slack. MUs are, after all, little more than glorified chat engines.
This would lead you to things like clickable menus that hide away when you're not using them; persistent background connections with intelligent notifications; a streamlined chat interface; etc.
Unfortunately, all of that is unlikely to happen. I think MUSHing, like many other kinds of video games and apps, is going to stay in the realm of things best done on non-mobile devices for the forseeable future.
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I mean at this point I would settle for "Mukluk with more than a single infinite-horizontal-scroll row input area; it would still suck ass, because it'd be Mukluk, but at least the input area would be less frustrating"
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@reversed switch to iPhone and get MUDRammer
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@reversed said in Designing for Mobile:
Mukluk with more than a single infinite-horizontal-scroll row input area; it would still suck ass
Yeah, I mean... you can play on mobile now, but as OP mentioned, typing commands is frustrating as heck on mobile (without an external keyboard), and the connections can be flakey.
The problem with apps like MUDRammer and Mukluk is that command-Line Interfaces are designed for typing, but mobile devices are optimized for touch interfaces. Any kind of CLI is going to run into that same basic issue.
The Ares web portal as a whole works fine on mobile, but it loses its ability to do "live" updates when the device goes to sleep, so that's frustrating too.
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@wildbaboons said in Designing for Mobile:
@reversed switch to iPhone and get MUDRammer
At least Mukluk can stay connected indefinitely (assuming your connection cooperates) without needing to be constantly reopened like MUDRammer does.
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@darren said in Designing for Mobile:
At least Mukluk can stay connected indefinitely (assuming your connection cooperates)
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@darren I don't tend to have this issue? I think it may be a setting somewhere.
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@wildbaboons said in Designing for Mobile:
@darren I don't tend to have this issue? I think it may be a setting somewhere.
I'm pretty sure this is due to the way that iOS works. On Android an app can use a background service to keep your connection alive. On iOS, only apps that have been blessed by Apple may run background services. The workaround is the app periodically sends a notification warning you that it may soon timeout, so that you can open it, which resets the idle timer.
At least I think that is how it works.
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@darren said in Designing for Mobile:
At least I think that is how it works.
Yeah it depends on the OS, the phone settings for background tasks, and how the app itself works.
Even if you can keep the connection open though, it's still not ideal. Keeping a telnet connection constantly open requires a lot more cycles than just waking up every so often to see if there are new emails or chats. Mobile apps are typically designed for the latter use case. MUSH servers don't work that way.
