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thoughts on temporary/no-file worlds?

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Posted by Fiendish   USA  (2,514 posts)  [Biography] bio   Global Moderator
Date Tue 09 Feb 2016 11:12 PM (UTC)
Message
I'm looking at packaging up a version of the Aardwolf MUSHclient package specifically for visually impaired players who rely on screen readers to play Aardwolf. For that I'm eliminating all of the miniwindows and visual displays, and will try instead to favor the classic technique of dumping captured lines for various things into other full-sized windows that the player can cycle between.

What are your thoughts on having a new kind of "world" that has no file associated with it and can therefore only be used for display?

I figure that the new temporary/no-file world would have the following attributes:
1) Sequentially generated ID (not random because there's no need, and it would only create the possibility of collision) with special "temp" prefix or postfix added.
2) Assigned name from passed in string argument that would then show up as the title of the world's window tab if window tabs are enabled.
3) Opening the configuration dialog brings up the one of the world that spawned it instead.

The current Open("foo.mcl") process requires making a new mcl file for each one, which has a few drawbacks. 1) It produces a fair bit of file clutter, and 2) it also makes it so that bringing up the configuration dialogues leaves the player in a bit of a tangle of blank world information not associated with their actual game where they're likely to encounter a whole bunch of "Your foo cannot be blank" error messages if they accidentally land on the name/ip/port configuration pane.

https://github.com/fiendish/aardwolfclientpackage
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (22,973 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #1 on Wed 10 Feb 2016 04:05 AM (UTC)
Message
Before I think deeply about your proposal, would not the Notepad windows do the job? They are text-only windows that are not necessarily associated with a disk file.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Fiendish   USA  (2,514 posts)  [Biography] bio   Global Moderator
Date Reply #2 on Wed 10 Feb 2016 06:45 PM (UTC)

Amended on Wed 10 Feb 2016 07:15 PM (UTC) by Fiendish

Message
I don't think so...

So far, the major deficiency I see is that when looking at a notepad the Game context goes away.
Alt+Enter, for example, suddenly changes meaning from something useful to something useless.
More catastrophic, perhaps, is that you can't simultaneously watch a notepad and also send commands. This includes sending a command to switch to a different notepad.

I think a better exploration will be to see whether I could cache main output contents and swap them out. I'll need to evaluate both the screen-reader and performance* implications of doing that.

* - Maintaining at least one circular buffer with up to, say, 50k** line entries in Lua and then dumping all of those lines to main output possibly many times per minute.

** - I need to discuss with some of the reader users whether large history is valuable to them or not.

https://github.com/fiendish/aardwolfclientpackage
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Posted by Fiendish   USA  (2,514 posts)  [Biography] bio   Global Moderator
Date Reply #3 on Wed 10 Feb 2016 08:45 PM (UTC)

Amended on Wed 10 Feb 2016 08:49 PM (UTC) by Fiendish

Message
Fiendish said:
** - I need to discuss with some of the reader users whether large history is valuable to them or not.

Confirmed, history is important. Printing thousands of lines at once is brutally latent. :\

https://github.com/fiendish/aardwolfclientpackage
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (22,973 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Reply #4 on Wed 10 Feb 2016 08:56 PM (UTC)
Message
Quote:

What are your thoughts on having a new kind of "world" that has no file associated with it and can therefore only be used for display?

...

More catastrophic, perhaps, is that you can't simultaneously watch a notepad and also send commands.


I took "only be used for display" as indicating commands would not be typed.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Fiendish   USA  (2,514 posts)  [Biography] bio   Global Moderator
Date Reply #5 on Wed 10 Feb 2016 10:45 PM (UTC)
Message
Nick Gammon said:

Quote:

What are your thoughts on having a new kind of "world" that has no file associated with it and can therefore only be used for display?

...

More catastrophic, perhaps, is that you can't simultaneously watch a notepad and also send commands.


I took "only be used for display" as indicating commands would not be typed.

Maybe, maybe not. I'm still thinking about that one. Besides that, how do you switch to a specific other notepad via keyboard without first going back to the game context?

https://github.com/fiendish/aardwolfclientpackage
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