[CF-Devel] crossfire vs mud

[Tim Rightnour]

On 07-Nov-01 Beno Attila wrote:
>
     
      hi,
     
     
Hello.

>
     
      I come from a mudding background, and am used to having 100+ users on the
     
     >
     
      same server. Looking at the metaserver stats, there are max 2-3 people
     
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      online at a time on a crossfire server. I don't assume there is a
     
     >
     
      technical reason for it, right?
     
     
It's a popularity thing.  Also word of mouth.  Crossfire has long been
unix-only, so that hurt us too.

>
     
      So why do all running servers have the out-of-the-box maps? Again, please
     
     >
     
      exuse me, I'm fairly new to crossfire, but fell in love with in pretty
     
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      quickly. :)
     
     
Maps aren't the easiest thing in the world to write.  Very few people write
maps.  If more people wrote maps.. more people would play.  The problem is that
the reverse is true as well.  Generally, we try to encourage new maps to be
submitted to the repository.  IMHO, the more maps that show up in the base
tree, the more popular and fun crossfire will be.  Once you reach a critical
mass of players, what you describe will happen on it's own.

>
     
      For the server, I was thinking about a script that goes through the
     
     >
     
      source files, and changes the texts, so the server itself can be upgraded
     
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      anytime, and still have the correct translations. (This could work for any
     
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      other language as well hopefully.)
     
     
So, having spent some time in the past doing things like i18n, I really have to
suggest you don't take that approach to the server side.  Thats going to cause
a zillion little problems.  There are two generally accepted ways of i18n'ing
something:

1) Use catgets and catalog facilities.  This is actually really easy.
2) Use gettext and friends.  I've heard this is easy, but never done it.

The problem is.. if you just convert it all to hungarian, then every time we do
any work on the server, you will have to manually apply our patches to the
server.  Now you could also do the mud thing, and branch off completely.  But
personally I think that would be a mistake.  Besides.. if you do one of those
methods, when someone wants to come by and translate it to french, they won't
have to repeat your whole excersize.

As for the windows client.. umm.. yeah.  There is no source for the DX client. 
It will be solved eventually when replaced with the SDL client.

---
Tim Rightnour <
     
     root at garbled.net
     
     >
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