Nanowrimo

The whole of November was taken up by me writing a novel. www.nanowrimo.org The C++ group I was involved with got to chapter 7. After that, we kind of stopped. Something about chapter 7 in that book just got very hard all of a sudden, even though we seemed to be making progress prior to that. Well actually, each chapter just got harder and harder.

One nice thing about novel writing is you do not have to worry about having a project to large to do by yourself at all. I find that I can write a whole novels myself without any help from anyone else. I won the nano write, but I still have not finished the story, being as I got over the 50k needed to win, but my plot is not really more than halfway done. The story is about a web developer who has no social life, so she joins a cult.

I could talk more about my plotting problems here, but I think I will leave that for somewhere else, as I know not all game developers like books in the horror genre. My husband loves to read horror novels, but he would not like to see the horror stuff happen irl. So then I asked him. If you don't like it for real, then why do you read so much of it? He likes a lot of Stephan king, except for the dark tower series. I hope I did not fill up my book with too many descriptions of her dreams and nightmares. When I do the editing, my critics might insist I take that part out.

User Interface design

User interface design is, IMHO one of the most important parts of designing any sort of software. Without a user interface, the user can not use the software in any meaningful manner. For command line tools, just having a syntax and an explination of what the various options mean is fine. However, when we get into graphical programs written for end users rather than just sys admins, we need to think a bit differently about what is nesessary. For a long time, there were MUDS, or for the less informed, multi-user dungeons. Basically, these were text based chat games. You would enter a "room" like a chat room, but this room had a description of it. You would define your character, often very much like in a regular role-playing game, but, of course it was all in text, so when the blob hit you for 2 points, you did not see a blob, you did not see a screen, you did not see a character who was slowly losing health. Only the lines of text could tell you what was going on. You had to create the entire picture in your mind, a far more difficult feat than merely reading a book, because, after all, you also had to figure out what to do about the fact that this blob had just hit you for two points.

These early games, in addition to having to imagine the whole thing, also posed problems with the user interface. When you finally killed the blob (unfortunately it was more likely that it killed you), you had to figure out how to loot its corpse. There was no double clicking on that blob on the screen. There was no mouse over, it was all key board. Then you had to figure out how to equip items. There was no drag and drop with the mouse. Even worse, there was generally a lot of reading of instructions before you could get to the actual playing of the game, simply to figure out how you could get out of the forest dead end road. You could not simply move your mouse to an opening in the path, you had to try every direction, where you would get the ominous message "you cannot go that way." and frequently forget what paths you did try.

Today, we have progressed far beyond the need to have an IQ of 200 (and more importantly a lot of patience) to play an mmorpg. A complete newbie can be moving the mouse around, and in seconds, he or she has managed to move the character, equip items, and fight that first battle.

However, crossfire, and thus its fork, Wograld, has a teriable user interface as of right now. (although if you are reading the archieves hopefully this has changed). The windows for stats, inventory,looting (also knowing as walking over floor tiles), chat, and hitting things have taken up most of the screen space, leaving little to see the actual game. Wograld has already improved this over crossfire, giving more screen real estate to the actual game. Yet the problem is that much of these windows need to be closed, that is hidden, so that they are not in the way of playing the game most of the time, except when you need to see them. Also, additional windows need to be added, that can also be minimized into a button in the same fashion, things like buttons for macros, detailed listings of your stats and skills, a quest log, a party screen, a map, detailed chat logs, all need to be made in this manner.

We have started a discussion on the forums about the user interface design, go see it and participate here.

Discussion about Wograld user interface

Dropping items on the ground, an essential feature

Far too many so called MMORPGS, massive multiplayer online roleplaying games, for those who do not know the term, do not allow you to place items on the ground in the game world. One such game that is popular and lacking in this feature is World of Warcraft. When I first began playing World of Warcraft, I thought it would be more like Ultima Online, except with more races, a level based system, and better looking graphics. However, I realized within a few hours of playing the game, how many important features that I had come to enjoy in Ulitma Online, World of Warcraft lacked. In Ultima Online, just as in Crossfire, the engine Wograld is based on, you can put items on the ground. Evenutally these items decay on a set timer, either from the time they were last picked up, or from resetting an area as in Crossfire. Otherwise, memory and space in the game world would be eaten up with items. Ultima Online eventually found a way around the player tendancy to save every rusty dagger and empty box, a method called housing lockdowns. The way the lockdown system works, is you have a certain number of "places" for items to belong in your house. Each container holds a certain number of items, in UOs case, that number was 125, that would automatically not decay. Also, each piece of furnature would count towards the lockdown limit. In order to lock it down, your character would have to say "I wish to lock this down" but really that could have been changed to anything. Anyway, it would not allow you to make anymore than the number of lockdowns on the house into non decaying items.

Diablo2 also has items that can be dropped on the ground and a decay timer, so I was somewhat surprised that this was not implimented into World of Warcraft, given that even a classic 3d game such as Ultima 9 had this feature of being able to place items on the ground.

Anyway, I feel that, along with housing, dropping items on the ground should be an essential feature of rpgs. Putting items on the ground opens up numerous possiblities for roleplaying your characters that not putting them on the ground does not. For instance, you could make a circle out of an item, like say, flowers, and leave it up for an in game celebration of some event. Impassable obsticules like say, crates, can slow players down who are trying to get somewhere, given they would have to pick them up and move the crates to get through the area. After a long hard day of adventuring, it is nice to be able to put that mug of ale on the actual counter in the tavern, instead of just having to hold it in your inventory.