ESTIMATED RELEASE: Eventually
MOTTO: "You get what you pay for"

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CHANGES:

* COMPATIBILITY: Excellent!

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Note: This is a ruthlessly moderated topic and all replies will be deleted once digested...

Now this is something I've been meaning to say for a while, but have been to lazy to say. It's probably allready to far into the ball game to change, but here goes:

I think it would be cool if instead of each server playing one toy with parkland running in the background, each one should be just running park land, with a "toy" bulding on the map. In this toy building you could choose to start or join games. (The games would be running on temprary servers hosted by the moderator of the toy.)

[this won't happen for many reasons. But I do still like the idea (someday) of portals on the park being able to warp you to other servers.

But while connected to any server, you are ONLY aware of the existence of people attached to that server, you can ONLY connect to one server at a time, and that server ONLY has to support the bandwidth for a single toy session.

Those are the immutable rules of arcadia.

But someday I hope to be able to support "gracefully hopping between servers" without having to actually bop all the way out to the MIX Server List dialog. (That's Rocket Club Technology :-)

-s]

Whenever I try and fetch a face, Arcadia locks up. After the download finishes, or times up, it resurects just fine.

[you would, with your wacky network connection, probably see this even more than most players. Basically if the face fetch was going to fail (person behind firewall, gateway, proxy or whatever), then you get locked up until winsock times out. -s]

I am about to look into this, but it occurs to me that the use of sprite ID 0 would probably be a mistake.

So a list which looks like this:

1=2,3,0,4,5,6

Probably would be understood as:

1=2,3

My guess about "per layer" makes no sense at all, since I am pretty sure the sprites are added to the "final map" after all the layers have been blended together, purely on the final texture "per map pixel" as it were.

More likely the problem will be (if not use of sprite 0) something in my random placement algorithm. I think the way that works is it picks a random park location first, then checks the texture of that location, then picks a random element from the list for that texture.

Hence it is quite possible that a statistically infrequent texture could get no sprites placed on it at all.

May I just take this opporunity to complain about GetRight? (I may have the name wrong. I mean one of those download helper programs which works by simulataneously requesting the file a zillion times, hoping to get more than its fair share of the server bandwidth)

I know it's obnoxious to make you confirm who you want to be every time, but if I didn't do that, then I would either have to:

1.) take you to a menu instead, which included an option to 'change logon' or 'proceed'

In which case you would STILL have to click your mouse to do what you want. No net gain for you.

2.) take you directly to the server, but give you some sort of pull-down menu command or something to explicitly change logon names.

So, less clicking for one case, but more mysterious clicking for other cases.

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What if you added the login options directly into the server list?

Or perhaps the "Where would you like to play today" list...

Maybe something like: http://www.ebag333.gametribe.net/arcadialogin.jpg

Notice the "new" menu User Account. You could use that for all those extra features such as Switch Users, Change Password, Delete User, etc.

Notice I greyed out the password box. You could do that when no password was required. You can also remember the last user to login. This way you can just type in the username, hit tab, enter password, hit tab, hit enter. Or something like that.

You don't really need to pick a name for solo mode, do ya? Who else is gonna see it?

I just noticed something, why are your Arcadia servers different versions?

[This message has been edited by Ebag333 (edited 10-22-2001).]

In any case, the 'account' stuff is handled by the application layer (Arcadian account needs are radically different from WoS or Warpath account needs) and the dialog in question is handled by a common library which doesn't know about the application itself.

You didn't answer one of my question, however. Why are your servers two different versions?

[because the server named "development test server" has newer code.. -s]

Wouldnt that make a great game!? We could take every game that anyone likes, add "syn" to the beginning! Yeah, that would be cool!

~~~~~

Seriously though, Arcadia is not meant for rehashing old games. It's meant to be a shell for quick games.

Yes, chess is not exactly original. Spades has even been done by samsyn before. synSpace can be refered to as part of an "ilk"

But there is always something new. synChess allows customizable boards and pieces, and has 16 different tables to play on. Spades has multiple tables as well, and allows you to use your own skin. synSpace has powerups, "3D" camera, etc.

So please, if your proposed toy can only be explained as "it's just like [insert game]".

If you have an original idea, or an original take on a used genre, go ahead, but if you just want to play classic games, go play the real ones.

When people are AFK or something, You could Page them. This would set off their PC speaker or something.

There should be #1 a limit..like once every 5 minutes.

#2 a way to disable it if you just dont wanna be paged

There is a volume control in the voice setup, but even on the lowest, you can still hear SFX

-Jacius

I tested it on the boat. You start off at one side and then go up and down the boat without using left or rihgt keys. Eventually you slide off the right side.

Sorry if this topic has come up already