Re: [gnome-mud] Post 0.10 development

[Jens Bech Madsen <jbm oncable dk>]

On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 19:41, Jordi Mallach wrote:
> Now that 0.10.3 is finally out (thanks Robin!, be more patient on IRC ;)
> it's time to think about what to do with g-m generally speaking. It's
> taken two months to release this version, even if it was done. We've
> been discussing to death about switching to libglade and doing this
> stuff or that stuff. The reality is that GNOME Mud has apparently lost
> all the man power which accomplished the GTK -> GNOME move, the 0.9.x
> series and the initial GNOME 2 port. Some time ago, people just stopped
> working on this project, and since then it has crawled.
> 
> I think g-m has an opportunity of establishing as the "de-facto" GNOME
> client: it has come a long way, and it's the first client people find
> when they look for a GNOME client. But there's a lot of stuff to do, and
> I don't think it's realistic (please correct me if I'm too pesimistic)
> to think we'll get an initial version of 0.11 any time soon.
> 
> We should try to get some help from the GNOME community, ie, try to get
> some fresh blood in the devel team. I think some post in FootNotes
> announcing 0.10.3 as the last version in the 0.10.x series, and then
> talking about the lack of manpower to complete our feature requests, to
> see if it draws some interest would be nice.
> 
> What do you guys think? Am I being silly? Is gnome-mud ok as it is?

A few comments from a wannabe user:

There are a number of reasons why I continue to use tinyfugue instead of
gnome-mud in spite of how attractive python scripting sounds to me:

   * I can't find a font which looks as good as whatever font is default
in Debian's regular xterms. I prefer black background and grey text for
my mud windows, and all fonts look bad and are hard to read when they
are anti-aliased. I've tried to disable the anti-aliasing in my
fonts.conf but it still looks bad. This is not something I can fault
gnome-mud for, but it's still a major problem for me.

   * I can't include settings from one profile into another. I have the
settings common to all my characters in a seperate file so I don't have
to duplicate aliases, triggers and substitutions into the settings files
for the individual characters. See
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=117238

   * Since I am not a developer I don't really want to run cvs versions.
But the crashers I reported in July are fixed in a tarball release in
November. That's four months. Granted I didn't supply a backtrace for
one of them until September, but it is still a very long time to wait
for crasher fixers.


For the next release it might be useful to make some actual plugins to
show people what can be done. I know there are some examples in the help
files, but a live example is a lot more powerful than code listings.

I don't use very advanced features when I play so I don't really know
what features could be implemented. Logging of lines to seperate
windows, maybe, for catching tells, chats etc. Logging in general would
be useful. I prefer to log all my mud sessions. TF lets me save each
session to a file which is named after the session with a timestamp in
the name. Good for looking up things later.

Another feature which I absolutely love in tinyfugue is the way it can
page output. If I receive more than a screenfull of text from the mud
without entering a command, the output stops and is displayed a
screenfull at a time when I press TAB. It is very useful for an idling
wizard :-)


I hope some of the above was helpful.


Cheers,
Jens