[crossfire] Account based login musings/thoughts/ideas

[Mark Wedel]

  So I'm actually making some real progress on the account based login.  But in 
doing so, have come across a few issues I thought I'd ask for input in.

Character passwords:  Legacy characters have a hash password in the .pl file. 
This will be used by the new login method to associate one of these legacy 
characters with an account (if you know a name and its password, you can 
associate it with your new account).  Once a character is associated with an 
account, when you log in your acocunt, you will be able to play any of those 
characters without needing any more passwords

  However, for newly created characters, this isn't really relevant - that extra 
password isn't used (as noted above).  But an issue is what to do with that - it 
could still be useful if you are playing on a legacy client that does not 
support account based logins (in which case you could login as now - character 
name & password).

  One thought I had was to just use the password for the account for the 
character also - in this way it has a password, and the server should have the 
hashed version of the password around someplace, so could fill it in without any 
extra questions.  Thoughts?

Rules/motd/news files:  Aside from the fact that having 3 different files to 
display at login seems excessive (and one could argue that motd is a subset of 
news since motd is Message Of The Day, not that it is used for that), my login 
method will display some/all of these to the player during the account login.

  My thought is you want to display them early, just as now - you don't want 
someone to go through creating an account, only for them to find out the rules 
aren't something they like when they get to the create a character screen.

  A question then comes on when to display each message.  I'm thinking that the 
'news' should be displayed at the first login screen - there could be 
information there that affects their ability to login in.  Similarly, the motd 
contains generally useful information, so display it then makes sense.

  Since the rules are a bit more in depth, I'm thinking of display it during the 
account creation screen and character selection screen.  This way folks will see 
it - in the first case, before they create an account, in the second case, each 
time before they play.

  Opinions?

(as an aside, I plan to update the protocol so that the client can do a 
'requestinfo' for these files instead of having to try and intercept drawinfo 
messages.  I'm also thinking that some server based commands could be moved to 
the client)

Format of news file:
Currently, it is listed as oldest first, with newest at the bottom.  It seems to 
me that the reverse (newest at top) is better - just like the Changelog - you 
start reading, and once you get to an entry you have seen before, you stop - 
this is more relevant for the interface I'm providing since if the news file is 
many entries long, a scrollbar will be needed to display all the information, at 
it is more natural to keep the scrollbar at the top and then have the user 
scroll down then position the scrollbar at the bottom and have the user need to 
keep scrolling up to find relevant entries.

  I realize that for many clients in which this text is mixed with the other 
messages at start up, and for other reasons, you want the scrollbar at the 
bottom by default, and have the user scroll up.

  One thought I had here was for the client to re-order the news file on its own 
(presume it is a oldest first) - the format of the file dictates that % entries 
denote a heading, but I thought I'd throw this out there for general thoughts.