Re: The importance of customisation

From: "Enno Rehling" <rehling@usa.net>

Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 00:00:00 +0000

>Would, then, a designer of a new game be well-advised to place an emphasis
>on outputting the turn in a computer-friendly format (which is easy for
>players to develop custom processors for), rather than spend a lot of time
>producing an interface which, regardless of how good it may be, won't be
>appreciated by the majority of players?

In a recent survey we found that the majority of our players uses an editor.
The Eressea turn-sheets are rather pleasant t read, I think.
There is however, a machine-readable turn sheet that's being used in all
sorts of player-written clients. It has all the info that comes in the
standard turn sheet, but in a very reader-unfriendly/machine-friendly way.

One note to fellow designers: Have your program write _one_ type of
turn-sheet only. Then create all other styles based on that. At one point,
Eressea offered three reports (human-readable, perl-readable and
computer-readable), and every now and then, some information that shouldn't
ave been available to players was nevertheless visible in one of the
reports - updating is a hassle, testing all three of them is a real pain. So
generate only one, then parse it to create other styles.

And if you want your players to cooperate in writing clients, give them a
basic class library to read those sheets and to make a client from. We have
something like that for perl, c++ and java.

Enno.

--- Eressea PBeM: http://eressea.home.pages.de/

References

The importance of customisation
htp@dove.net.au (Henry Penninkilampi)
Sun, 21 Feb 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Referenced By

The importance of customisation
htp@dove.net.au (Henry Penninkilampi)
Sun, 21 Feb 1999 00:00:00 +0000