[crossfire] Account based login musings/thoughts/ideas

[Robert Brockway]

On Sun, 21 Mar 2010, Mark Wedel wrote:


> 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

The 'news' command on *nix is nice.  By default it only displays news 
items that you haven't seen before.   Presumable it keeps each news item 
as a separate file and compares the timestamps of the news files to the 
last login to determine what items the user should see.

Users could be free to read all the news again via a command.

> 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.

It could display each item one at a time with the user having to click a 
'next' button (or skipping).  I don't think this will be terribly onerous 
as I expect multiple news items would be the exception rather than the 
rule (based on personal experience of similar situations).

BTW I love the idea of accounts.

Cheers,

Rob
-- 
Email: robert at timetraveller.org
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