Ghost Characters and Chat Clients

[trollson]

Recently we have had a number of players leave the game, due to various reasons, often RL time commitments. Sometimes lost characters reappear, but for little other than to have a chat with friends and guildmates; to keep up the relationships they have established (if they dare!).

 

Certainly we could easily produce a chat-only client for these players. But while this would reduce requirements client side, the server still has to deal with a fully featured avatar, even if they just sit there.

 

It would be a nice feature to be able to log in as a "ghost" character, just to participate in chat. The server would need to recognise this, and not waste resources managing their avatar in game; other players would not see the character, and not be able to interact "physically".

 

If you wanted to make a feature of this, you could choose to render chat-only avatars as "ghosts" (immaterial, transparant, and optional). However, from an RPG aspect it seems wrong to have characters as ghosts one day, and real the next. Maybe you'd have to declare the character "ghosted", as an alternative to '#killme yes'.

 

There is, of course, a whole raft of possibilties for giving ghosts something different to other characters... But the limit remains that they should only require a non-graphical (ascii) client for whatever they could do.

[0ctane]

Certainly we could easily produce a chat-only client for these players. But while this would reduce requirements client side, the server still has to deal with a fully featured avatar, even if they just sit there.

I think this a fantastic idea. I have suggested it to Awn before. Also, if you are at work and want to chat, your boss does not need to see you playing a game. Integration with GAIM or other IM programs would make it even better, but a simple terminal interface would be nice for a start.

[the_antiroot]

Actually 2 of the former developers already wrote text mode chat clients,

elchat (ncurses based) and pdchat (pdcurses based for winows) .

 

wouldnt take much tidying up to bring em up to date (they work but were pre multi channel).

 

A really elegant solution would be for somone to write a plugin for gaim though. (http://gaim.sourceforge.net/) but that woudn need a real programmer , not me

[0ctane]

Actually 2 of the former developers already wrote text mode chat clients,

elchat (ncurses based) and pdchat (pdcurses based for winows) .

 

wouldnt take much tidying up to bring em up to date (they work but were pre multi channel).

 

A really elegant solution would be for somone to write a plugin for gaim though. (http://gaim.sourceforge.net/) but that woudn need a real programmer , not me

Do you have links for elchat and pdchat? Is the source available?

[edit] nevermind, found it at http://segv.antiroot.homedns.org/index.php...le=details&id=1

 

previous thread here: http://www.eternal-lands.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=12168

 

Still, gaim plugin would be sweet.

Edited May 1, 2006 by 0ctane

[crusadingknight]

Actually, I have a fixed version (though, it still needs maybe 23 lines of logic to show channel numbers, since it just skips them for now). If anyone wants it, I can try to clean it up a bit more and release it (I've also been reading the pdcurses documentation, which is just one massive man page, so I managed to get the pdcurses client to render everything the ncurses one does, and still compile cleanly in ncurses. I also fixed the CF/LF line ending handling.).

Edited May 1, 2006 by crusadingknight

[0ctane]

Actually, I have a fixed version (though, it still needs maybe 23 lines of logic to show channel numbers, since it just skips them for now). If anyone wants it, I can try to clean it up a bit more and release it (I've also been reading the pdcurses documentation, which is just one massive man page, so I managed to get the pdcurses client to render everything the ncurses one does, and still compile cleanly in ncurses. I also fixed the CF/LF line ending handling.).

Good to hear. It would make my life easier (probably) to stick with ncurses since it is already available on OS X, at least in 10.4.

[trollson]

Its good to see that there is already a chat-only client (I thought that there might be).

 

I still feel that it would be useful for the server to know which characters are logged in for chat only, and not for interaction, and to then be able to handle them differently (hence the reference to "ghosts").

[Drakos7]

Toying around with my code I created a lurker. You can login in and just listen, but not say anything. This was before I knew about the aforementioned chatbots. Perhaps I will look into that code.