[CF-Devel] Future of Crossfire

[DAVID DELBECQ]

There is one great points i agree on the debate we have on the list:

We need to attract new players to the game and people who could play the most
are windows player (am not speaking about actual crossfire players). To
attrack these players to crossfire we need two critical points:

  1) An attractive interface which mean beautiful graphics. An iso set becomes
urgent. This set should be more complete than the actual 2D set (more monster
orientations and animations). It is obvious the crossfire server could not
handle bandwidth for loading all these gfx, so we should create a standard
pictures naming and force the clients to download, via ftp for example, the
set before playing or allow the client to use an alternate ones. So we take of
this part of the job from the server.

  2) a user friendly client. For the moment, most players have do do thinks
like bind cast ice storm   bind ...... This NOT attractive. We should have a
client which know most of the action which can be done on crossfire and give
player a list of these action with in front the associated key (like in most
other RPG or Quake likes) or allow binding like in diablo. This client should
be done for windows in priority and under GPL for faster developpement.
The current directx client is interesting and a lot of work seems to have been
done on it but am not sure this client could follow forever the server,
especially when importants changes are made (like if we run to iso gfx for
example) because his developper is alone for maintenance. Once again am saying
what a lots of developper are saying: "Michael Toennies make your client GPL,
it could become crazily good".

Performances of the server are not so important for the moment. Even if we
have a high perfomances server, most rpg players will immediately go away
because frightened by the ugly gfx. Most of the time, they will not download
the client because of screenshots they have seen.


Once again, the iso set is very interresting, if people are ready to help me,
i would be glad to work on the client side programming (In fact, am not free
before end of june because of exams). In fact, it only needs little change
(change the drawer and turn of 45° the direction in client side). To do this,
i need a small, working, iso set and we need to define the format we will use
for pictures.




David Delbecq
     
     David.delbecq at usa.net
     
     

____________________________________________________________________
Get free email and a permanent address at 
     
     http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1