[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface

[Jon A. Lambert]

On 26 Sep 97 at 1:45, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Sep 1997 23:57:58 PST8PDT, "Jon A. Lambert"
> <jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> 
> >On 25 Sep 97 at 20:39, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> >> I don't always count these among MUDs; in
> >> fact, my suggestions that we just might learn something by looking at
> >> MUSHes and MUCKs were met with some level of derision. 
> >
> >WRONG. Your insistence in using the term MUD to refer to things not
> >of MUSH was met with a great deal of derision and resistance.

You should note that I did not participate in the earlier threads
until the notion of alternative interfaces was advanced by myself.
 
> Yes, it was, as was my suggestion that maybe we ought to take a closer
> look at the building interface on MUDs and perhaps take some cues from
> the MUSH community. This in turn led to some very annoying responses
> about how stupid all the @ signs were and I was obviously a codebase
> bigot because @ signs suck so hard and having to type one is a big pain
> in the ass and those MUSH building commands are just a bunch of crap.
> (If @ signs are such a pain in the ass, what the hell are you doing
> sending e-mail?) 

I've got no problem with this.  The @ signs were originally used to
separate character speech from commands and in some servers to 
distinguish OOC activities from IC activities if I'm not mistaken.  
The concept is used on a number of different mud servers.  Some muds 
make use of special prefixes to distinguish administration commands 
from player commands.  Character speech may well end up as my default 
for text input.   

> interfaces were so much better
> and somehow no one ever got around to providing an example of how
> radically cool the building interface on that ultimately cool easy to
> use server was. 

I did provide the requisite info and will again.

> I did see a screen dump of a menued interface with
> several fields I couldn't intuitively identify, but that hardly
> qualified as 'easy' in my mind.

Hmm methinks you refer to several varieties of OLC.  While I'm not 
a big fan of it in it's urm present state.  It is an alternate 
interface to edittin the area text files you used in your example.  
There also exist much better interfaces to Diku family servers.

> There is, however, no point in reviving the building interface thread.
> It's been beaten up all over the place already, and evidently it's not
> considered important. Luckily, people seem to think that to some degree
> the *user* interface is important, which has led to some very thought
> provoking discussion.

I think the user interface IS important and that it's import extends 
to the builder interface.

> >It was also your contention that 
> >good builder documentation exists for MUSHes but not for MUDs. 
> 
> Which in my own experience, being the only experience I can draw upon,
> is true. I have seen excellent building documentation for MUSHes. I have
> seen very little building documentation at all for MUDs. Prove me wrong:
> show me. URLs, FTP sites, whatever. I don't care what form they're in.
> Show me the docs. No one did this in the previous thread either. I had
> one or two mentions of 'Joe-Bob did some good docs for WhizBangMUD
> once', or similar things, but nothing specific. The burden of proof lies
> with the proponent of the positive hypothesis, and to shoulder my
> portion of said burden I submit "Amberyl's MUSH Manual" which may be
> located easily and quickly on any search engine.
> 

OK, Several easily located URLs for the Diku family tree.  Referring
to your example of other MUDs building. (assumes Diku ~= Muds)

The Curious Area Workshop Diku Builder's Guide
<http://cspo.queensu.ca/~fletcher/VieMud/Caw/Bhndbk/>

The Circle Builder's Guide
<http://www.circlemud.org/~jelson/circle/cdp/building/building.html>

The Anonymud Area Builder's Guide
<http://www.tidalwave.net/~rainman/txt/Anon2_4.txt>

The Rom 2.4 Area Builder's Documentation
<http://www.tidalwave.net/~rainman/txt/Rom24area.txt>

It is my opinion that MZF and SPAM are THE BEST building interfaces
that have been released to date for ANY codebase that I am aware of.  
This is not an endorsement of Diku family servers nor their intrinsic 
capabilities or flaws.  It is an endorsement of this type of 
interface as highly intuitive, extremely productive, user friendly 
and more importantly they make building FUN.  While the two 
interfaces I mention are platform-dependent, server-dependent and 
offline, there exists NO reason why the same concepts can be extended 
to an online and platform independent environment (cf Java).   

For those of you who are interested the editor and many screen 
shots of MZF (Make Zones Fast) are available at:
 
<http://www.goodnet.com/~esnible/mzf.html>

Comments encouraged since both building and programming will be done
on my server using a similar interface.  

> >assumptions about what a MUD game is about is also colored by these 
> >distinctions. 
> 
> No, quite definitely they are, because the human mind is by nature
> narcissistic. There is no shame in that quality, and it is in fact this
> and similar qualities that make it the superb piece of biological
> machinery that it is. Each and every experience we have is related in
> thousands of ways to experiences we have already had, improving the
> brain's ability to sort, separate, and group. This is furthermore an
> efficient method of collation in almost any case, as chaos theory and
> the fractal nature of reality bear out. It is never possible for the
> human mind to be completely objective, as at that point it ceases to be
> human.
> 
> Any non-humans on this list are free to exempt themselves from this.
>

Point well taken.  Only the list owner is objective. <smirk *duck*>
 
> It seems rather obvious to me that when I refer to 'man' and 'woman' the
> meaning of 'man' is significantly different than when I refer to 'man'
> and 'ape' -- and further, it does not imply in any way that 'ape' and
> 'woman' are equivalent, interchangeable, or even similar. A further
> difference in definition is found in the treatment of 'man'/'beast',
> 'man'/'boy', 'man'/'wimp', and several other word pairs. This is called
> 'context sensitivity', and it is part of our basic reading comprehension
> skills. I therefore submit for your consideration that there is a
> context determination difficulty somewhere, and I rather doubt it's on
> my end. The word 'level' carries multiple meanings in stock AD&D - a
> designation of character experience, a measure of monster power, a
> measure of spell power, a specific physical area of a dungeon - and yet
> there is no confusion. I therefore postulate that it is not only
> possible but *trivial* to have a single word which carries multiple
> different meanings depending on context, and yet is perfectly
> understandable in each of those contexts.

It is true in the case of the word 'man' we share common experience 
and are able to parse(?) the context quite easily.

I have noted that posters make frequent clarifications of the context 
of the word 'level' in there posts.  The common experience most 
pointed to is D&D for reference of context. (Not that all of us have 
experience with D&D, although I think many posters are familiar with 
it)

Many on the list don't have common context when one speaks of MUDs.

Suppose one posts:
   "In Silly we allow characters to combat each other in an
    automated fashion, the server resolves the combat. Most MUDs 
    don't have any way for your characters to fight each other 
    without the aid of an adminstrative person to resolve it.  I 
    think this just might be an area where we can learn from 
    Silly."

It certainly would invite comments about the poster's variety of 
experience and questions about exactly what MUDs they are using for 
comparison.

> Perhaps more to your own satisfaction, it should be obvious there are
> times when you must draw a distinction between server family X and
> everything else, such as when you hold up an example of what you
> consider 'correct' behavior. You know, like that thread on building. It
> is thus convenient AND correct to use the generic term MUDs to refer to
> the remainder of the group even while a more specific term is used for
> the example. 
>
> A discussion of MUDs and MOOs would be perfectly
> appropriate when spotlighting something specific to MOO. A discussion of
> MUDs and Dikus would be likewise appropriate. A set *can* be
> productively compared to a superset of itself, as quite obviously to say
> it is a subset of the other set involves a direct comparison resulting
> in a relevant and positive conclusion.

Yet there exists a problem with specific to superset comparisions 
when the properties of the superset are not known, understood, or 
thought by the poster to be held in common.  

--
Jon A. Lambert

If I'd known it was harmless, I would have killed it myself.