Here’s the first prototype of a web client for my new game.
I’ve decided to split the client into three main areas with a top window for location data (name, description, contents, exits, map), a bottom window for messages and a tabbed sidebar for other information (inventory, PC stats, target, party, spells, skills etc.)
I’ve put in some basic interactions with buttons that activate commands and clickable links for characters, objects and exits. Clicking on characters or objects brings up a popover with name and description as well as buttons for interaction (I’ve only implemented ”get” for objects so far).
The client uses bootstrap, knockout and websockify, none of which I’ve used before so the code is probably pretty ugly at this stage. Websockify includes examples for telnet and IRC clients so it was easy to adapt what I needed for a simple mud client connection.
Knockout allows you to bind model data in your markup and have it update automagically as the underlying data changes which should make it easy to keep everything in sync.
Obviously there’s a lot missing still and it’s more a proof of concept than anything else at this stage.
bcdev.design.blog 
Good thing & good luck! I have built an experimental client using bootstrap, the java-javascript socket bridge (http://stephengware.com/proj/javasocketbridge/) and ansi2html (https://github.com/agnoster/ansi2html) … which has performance issues 🙂
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Sounds good, do you have a demo of the client up anywhere?
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Yes, it’s at bit.ly/QapAAx . (Own risk, hazard, warn… “post-concept-code” … 😉 )The server mentoined in the form is not up all times, so you might want to try another one if that one doesn’t work.
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Looks good and thanks for sharing. I like how it doesn’t need anything server side like the Flash policy files, but I guess it shifts that inconvenience onto the client with the java security alert. Performance seemed fine to me in a quick test, but it didn’t look like you were limiting the display buffer so I guess that would slow things down after a while.
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I don’t know if I’ve ever showed you this game, http://emshort.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/jon-ingolds-the-colder-light/ . For a text game its interface is pretty interesting, I’ve been wondering if some of the contextual buttons it uses couldn’t carry over well.
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I’d not seen that before, but it’s definitely the kind of thing I’m aiming for. I really like the way this one (linked from that page) is done http://dl.dropbox.com/u/947038/Sand-Dancer%20Sans%202/play.html Other than chat, it should be possible to do away with typed commands altogether.
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Like this too!
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Very nice. Had an idea like this for Java Swing desktop app against a text mud. Well done!
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Are people still text muddin? I have not been out to mudconnect in years…
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