[CF-Devel] Future of Crossfire

[dnh]

Umm I tend to disagree with this.

Firstly, I honestly DON'T believe an 'iso' view version of crossfire, or
at least a version like the 'standard set'. I personally believe that with
a short month, Peterm and I have created a better, more congruent, set
that really does look great. The alternate set (which can be found on
crossfire.csua.ber....) may look easy to convert to iso but there is a
large problem and that is with the multitiled monsters. If we take on an
iso view major changes are going to have to be made, and IMHO it simply
isn't worth our time.. certainly if some wiz artists comes along AND MAKES
the new images I would be happy to see such ventures, but until we have
some real live artist walking about, that I can talk to and ask questions
about, I don't support this view.

Secondly, you say our servers can't support uploading the images to the
clients? what do you think they already do? and what do you think is
already supported? if you add -usefile or something like that, it will
grab its images from a set of pngs, you don't need to get them from the
server. This is merely an implementation problem and I am sure Mark would
be willing to hear suggestions on a better way to do it ;).

2) We have been looking for someone to work on the linux client for a long
long time, Mark has done some excellent work, but the fact remains it is
not an interface heavy client. It is simple, it works and I personally
find it very useable. Some speed improvements and a few new options in the
preferences and I think we have an excellent client already. Most stuff
you find in clients today tends to be artists who have plenty of time, if
we have one.. then perhaps we could consider this.

Not only this, but we are constantly updating the server, I personally
have been involved in adding 10 or so spells, and I don't think I want to
consider having to fix the client everytime I add a new spell =\.

These are just a few thoughts, but they were eating at me, sometimes you
must remember that crossfire is not a commercial game, and we don't have
spare resources lieing about. While setting a high goal is fine, I think
we should set ones that we can achieve ourselves, realistically.

dnh

 On Thu, 17 May 2001, DAVID DELBECQ wrote:

>
     
     
     >
     
      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
      
      
     >
     
      _______________________________________________
     
     >
     
      crossfire-devel mailing list
     
     >
     
     
      crossfire-devel at lists.real-time.com
      
      
     >
     
     
      https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/crossfire-devel
      
      
     >