March 2007

• [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Andreas Weidenhaupt
• • [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Morris Cox
  • [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Michael Hartman
  • • [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Andreas Weidenhaupt
    • • [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Michael Hartman
  • [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Mike Rozak
  • • [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Andreas Weidenhaupt
    • • [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Damion Schubert
      • • [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Andreas Weidenhaupt
• [NEWS] Trident Games Prepares New Online Game Using Skotos Engine Shannon Appelcline
• [TECH] MMOG Design List Weston Fryatt
• • [TECH] MMOG Design List Lachek Butalek
  • • [TECH] MMOG Design List Adam Martin
  • [TECH] MMOG Design List Mike Rozak
  • • [TECH] MMOG Design List Weston Fryatt
  • [TECH] MMOG Design List Hyrup, Darrin
  • [TECH] MMOG Design List Morgan Ramsay
• [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work mud-dev-list@jaruzel.com
• • [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work Lachek Butalek
  • • [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work Sean Howard
    • [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work David Johansson
    • • [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work Lachek Butalek
      • • [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work David Johansson
  • [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work Keith Dunwoody
  • • [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work Sean Howard
• [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Morris Cox
• • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Caliban Darklock
  • • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Lachek Butalek
    • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Adam Martin
    • • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Caliban Darklock
  • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Adam Martin
  • • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rantagainst Vanguard reviews and rants) Craig Huber
    • • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rantagainst Vanguard reviews and rants) Sean Howard
      • • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rantagainst Vanguard reviews and rants) Craig Huber
        • • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: Arantagainst Vanguard reviews and rants) Dave Scheffer
          • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rantagainst Vanguard reviews and rants) Sean Howard
    • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Morris Cox
    • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Jeffrey Kesselman
    • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments John Buehler
      • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jeffrey Kesselman
        • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments John Buehler
          • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Damion Schubert
          • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Tess Snider
            • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments John Buehler
              • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Adam Martin
                • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jeffrey Kesselman
              • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Mike Rozak
              • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jeffrey Kesselman
                • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jeffrey Kesselman
              • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jeffrey Kesselman
              • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Acius
              • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jeffrey Kesselman
        • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Mike Rozak
        • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Chris Richards
          • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments John Buehler
            • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Ling Lo
              • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments John Buehler
            • [ANNOUNCE] Magic Study John Buehler
            • • [ANNOUNCE] Magic Study Mike Sellers
              • • [ANNOUNCE] Magic Study John Buehler
                • • [ANNOUNCE] Magic Study John Buehler
            • [TECH] Randomly-generated Faction Names cruise
            • • [TECH] Randomly-generated Faction Names John Buehler
              • [TECH] Randomly-generated Faction Names Johnicholas Hines
              • [TECH] Randomly-generated Faction Names Lachek Butalek
          • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments John Buehler
          • • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Adam Martin
        • [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jon Leonard
  • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Sean Howard
  • • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Morris Cox
    • • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Sean Howard
      • • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Morris Cox
        • • [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Adam Martin
• [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Michael Hartman
• • [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Jean, Yannick
  • • [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Michael Hartman
    • • [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Damion Schubert
      • • [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Jeffrey Kesselman
        • • [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) cruise
          • [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Michael Hartman
          • • [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Jeffrey Kesselman
      • Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] cruise
      • • Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] John Buehler
        • • Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] Sean Howard
        • Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] Michael Hartman
        • Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] Jeffrey Kesselman
        • • Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] cruise
          • • Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] Jeffrey Kesselman
    • [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Jeffrey Kesselman
• [DESIGN] Turn Around Time On Experimentation (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Adam Martin
• • [DESIGN] Turn Around Time On Experimentation (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Sean Howard
    "Adam Martin" <adam.m.s.martin@googlemail.com> wrote:
    
    >>From personal experience of long years of writing GUI's and GUI libs
    > I'm afraid I disagree; I think there are reasons that people make more
    > progress with text, but that turnaround time isn't the main one.
    
    It's not so much just the turn-around time as it is the price of change.
    Turn-around time affects that cost, but it by no means the only thing. It
    only matters during change or after failure, while something like being
    smart might affect all costs at every level. However, what I was saying is
    that one of the benefits text has over GUIs, more than anything else, is
    the quick turn-around time. There are benefits to both approaches, but
    text has that one down.
    
    > I used to have problems similar to those you described, but once I
    > (eventually - it wasn't hard, it just took me a long time to get
    > there) properly understood the mental models that underlay the GUIs I
    > was working with, and changed the object models (or equivalent in
    > non-OO langs) to suit, the turnaround time both for major (wide) and
    > fundamental (deep) changes to GUIs became vanishingly small.
    
    I do most of my coding in Java, and the Java GUI is a very broad and
    powerful framework - but this has a cost in complexity. More often than
    not, what the GUI is doing is taking a complex series of actions and
    reducing it to a single command. There are hooks to delegate this command
    to various places, but ultimately, it can be represented just as easily as
    a text command.
    
    But with the GUI, there's a lot of maintence beyond that. I was creating a
    multi-functional extendable resource editor, similar to something like
    ResEdit. I was monkeying around with a simple tree - requiring models,
    nodes, listeners, and a whole host of things - to do the simple act of
    listing what resources are available and opening an editor for it...
    something I decided could be just as easily accomplished with a console
    and /list and /edit <resID>.
    
    Ultimately, it is an editor, and I would rather spend my time working on
    non-editor stuff. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad GUIs are out there and
    that, for instance, tables can sort each column, and highlight each row,
    but sometimes, that's overkill and learning how to use those features (if
    only to learn how to NOT use them) and then implementing dozens of classes
    to pander to those features can be far more trouble than it's worth.
    
    > My vague, unscientific conclusion was that the biggest problem is
    > simply that the vast majority of programmers (and hence teachers,
    > courses, and programmer-teams) still haven't really learnt how/why
    > GUIs work conceptually. But I've long had a pet peeve about how much
    > of the really useful HCI research routinely gets by the development
    > community, sometimes for many many years, so that conclusion may be
    > personal bias more than anything else :).
    
    My experience with GUIs is fairly significant. It's not about a lack of
    willpower, motivation, or knowledge - it's about priorities. When I want
    to make something, it would be foolish to do more work than is needed or
    wanted.
    
    --
    Sean Howard
• [ANNOUNCE] What Makes A Next-Gen Game? Morgan Ramsay
• • [ANNOUNCE] What Makes A Next-Gen Game? Lachek Butalek
• [DESIGN] Multiplayer interactive fiction Mike Rozak
• • [DESIGN] Multiplayer interactive fiction John Buehler
  • [DESIGN] Multiplayer interactive fiction Paolo Piselli
  • • [DESIGN] Multiplayer interactive fiction Mike Rozak
• [BIZ] Austin Game Conference Contacts? Jeffrey Kesselman
• • [BIZ] Austin Game Conference Contacts? Daniel James
• [MEDIA] A good, hour-long news segment about Second Life Mike Rozak
• Combat Systems (was: Reasons for Play) Adam Martin
• • Combat Systems (was: Reasons for Play) Adam Martin
  • • Combat Systems (was: Reasons for Play) Hudson, Thomas C.
    • • Combat Systems (was: Reasons for Play) Jeffrey Kesselman
  • Combat Systems (was: Reasons for Play) Kerry Fraser-Robinson
  • Combat Systems (was: Reasons for Play) Jeffrey Kesselman
• [Announce] CircumReality - A grahical MUD (kind of) develoment toolkit Mike Rozak
• Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Hudson, Thomas C.
• • Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Jeffrey Kesselman
  • • Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Shannon Sullivan
    • • Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Sean Howard
      • • Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Adam Martin
    • Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Dana V. Baldwin
    • • Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Jeffrey Kesselman
      • • Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Peter Keeler
        • • Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Jeffrey Kesselman
        • Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Dana V. Baldwin
    • Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Tess Snider
  • Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguardreviews and rants) Richard A. Bartle