Xtian said:
This would cause problems for me: Firstly: The attack command you will send, will not be the same in every language. My German MUD might not understand it.
Well it would hardly be a very flexible system if "kill" was hard-coded into it would it?
I have already indicated I am supporting UTF-8 character encoding, so that you could use it for Chinese, Japanese, German, Greek, Russian etc. MUDs. So obviously some provision needs to be made to support sending commands in the language of the MUD.
Xtian said:
Secondly: I have established that left-click will look at an object, right-click will open a pop-up menu (with MXP).
I asked if MXP would be compatible because of issues like that - in my opinion that should fall into the servers decision space and the generic plugins should only offer the flexibility for the server to express what it wishes to represent.
I have no intention of parsing MXP per se. This is a system for exchanging data between client and server, whilst MXP is more of a mark-up language for textual output.
Having said that, certainly some sort of "show this menu if you click" protocol could be implemented. Although I am not sure that having to click, have a menu pop up, then scroll down to "attack" is useful in a combat situation.
Already, different object types need different actions, eg. water (drink), food (eat), enemy npc (kill), shopkeeper (trade), corpse (loot) etc.
One simple approach would be to let the server do all this. For example, if you LH or RH click on an item in the room list it simply sends:
lhclick <545847>
rhclick <445844432>
Then the server can say, "hey, s/he RH clicked on some food, s/he must want to eat it".
Alternatively, the server could send down a list of types of objects (eg. food, drink, light, wand) and a list of actions that apply for LH click and RH click, per object type. Then at least you could mouse-over for a hint (eg. "RH click to eat this").
I am still working on the proof-of-concept stage, and experimenting with that is raising interesting issues, like the above. |