[crossfire] Changing connection texts

[Mark Wedel]

Nicolas Weeger wrote:
>>   While you may jest, I still think that last comment is true.
>>
>>   As a very basic level, the client could request both the username &
>> password at once for login, with another button with something like 'create
>> new character'
>>
>>   Depending on what the user does, gets appropriate results - while I've
>> advocated rewriting the character creation process, that wouldn't need to
>> happen in this case - if the user clicks new character, it just dumps them
>> in the existing character creation area (but the messages there could
>> perhaps be customized a little better 'Enter desired character name', 'that
>> character name is already in use', 'Please enter password for this
>> character', type of thing.
>>
>>   If the user instead tries to login with invalid character name/password,
>> it should just print out a message like 'incorrect login', and not try to
>> create a new character for them, and try again - if the user really wants
>> to create a new character, they should explicitly have to hit the 'create
>> new character button'
> 
> 
> What I'd suggest:
> - introduce user accounts, to group characters

  Yes - that makes sense.  Other than user account names being unique, any other 
requirements we should have for them?

  Should some game things maybe be made account wide properties and not 
character properties?  Off the top of my head, I could think of things like 
apartments.


> - let the client gather login, check if account exists, then either ask for 
> password or help create account
> 
> 
> After logged in with user account, let select character or create a new one. 
> Maybe ingame already - like in a map.

  I don't really like an in-game solution.  While easy to do, and easy for all 
of us to deal with, its not great for new players.

  But I'm also not sure if your ingame comment refers to selecting a character 
to play or creating a new one.  For creating a new one, we could perhaps leave 
the existing mechanism there since redoing is more work.  But making in game 
(map based) character selection I think would be more work than just doing the 
appropriate dialogs.

In thinking about it, this is sort of the flow I see:

Step A - account creation/verification:
1: Player chooses to create new account, or enters username/password for 
account.  Note there should probably be some option to also change the account 
username/password.
2: If player enters correct username/password, go to character selection step 
(step B)
3: If player enters incorrect username/password, display message, go to step 1 
above.
4: If player creates new account, need to verify unique account name, mechanism 
to set password.

Question on accounts:  Where do we store this information?  May be a flat file 
or dbm file or something?  After all, the only information associated with an 
account is the name, password, and characters for that account - not a lot of 
information here.  But flat files don't work good if you have thousands of entries.

Step B: Character selection:
1: Player can choose from existing characters (display names), create a new 
character, or associate an existing character with this account (after all, for 
all characters existing before this change, they won't be associated).
2: If character selects existing character, just load up that character and play 
- assume that if the character has been set up for account, there is no need to 
check password, etc.
3: If player creates new character, basically same as now, but we don't need a 
password - like #2 above, since the character is associated with an account, we 
use that password.
4: If player needs to associated a character with this account, and for 
character name and password.  See if that is correct - if not, error out.  If 
so, verify that the character is not already associated with an account (if so, 
give them an option to associate with this new account?).  Once player 
associates character with account, go back up to B.1 - player may not want to 
play that character immediately - I could see a case when first creating the 
account that you want to associate all your characters with it.

  Note also that within the client, in addition the existing logout, there 
another option is needed.  Logout could be as it is now - logout and go back to 
metaserver selection.  But also log out character and go back to character 
selection - should make it somewhat easy for player to choose which character to 
play.