A text Myst Online project

[Pavitra]

http://seltani.shoutwiki.com/ is up.

The current logo is mostly a placeholder; anyone with actual artistic ability is more than welcome to create a better one.

[belford]

Excellent.

I came up with a logo image months ago, and never put it up anywhere: http://seltani.shoutwiki.com/wiki/File:Bird-book.png

[Pavitra]

Very nice. Thank you!

The wiki software seems to misbehave somewhat if I give it a logo image of different dimensions than it was expecting. Would you be willing to share the vector source, or to render a version that fits inside 150x150 pixels? (I've tried to rescale it myself using Inkscape's "Trace Bitmap" feature; you can judge whether the result looks acceptable.)

[Pavitra]

players.focus() seems not to update right away; [[players.focus()]] sometimes shows None when the focus pane is showing, and sometimes shows the name of a focus-view that I've already closed. I haven't figured out the rules of when it catches on, but it seems to be prodded by clicking links rather than waiting a certain amount of time.

[belford]

I've added the vector version of the logo. (I'm not sure it has white background in the same place as the PNG version. Easy to fix, if not.)

players.focus() should always be up to date, except probably when linking or panicking. (Those commands queue up actions rather than updating the database instantly.) I'd have to take a look at the exact situation, but I won't have a chance for a couple of weeks.

[belford]

And, let me say again -- thank you for setting this up and going at the wiki structure the way you're doing!

[KathAveara]

Due to the nature of where I am in the world right now, I've been thinking. Is it possible (in the far future, of course) to create a sort of offline Seltani, where one can browse Ages without requiring an internet connection?

[belford]

It's technically possible, if you install Python and MongoDB on your computer. I've done this on a laptop.

However, I don't plan to focus on supporting this.

Also, you'd have to have the Age definition data, and I don't plan to make that generally available for all Ages. (It would mean universal spoiler availability.)

[Christian Walther]

I have finally gotten around to playing Seltani, and I’m having a blast! A very interesting way of exploring. Thanks for sharing this with us, Belford!

So far I’ve only visited parts of Belford’s ages and none of the others, so there’s a lot still ahead of me. Haven’t met anyone else yet except Pavitra in one place, who seemed to be AFK.

My earlier connection problems were indeed down to Privoxy, I had to completely take it out of the way rather than just disable its filtering. I can now connect with Firefox, however Safari still says The connection to the server could not be opened. (undefined,undefined) (but http://www.websocket.org/echo.html works).

My first reactions to the user interface of the game:

• I would like to see a visual distinction between “look” links (that pop up the description box at the bottom) and “go” links (that take you to some other place). I would often click on a link and be taken by surprise when it took me somewhere else, thinking “hey, I didn’t want to walk away yet, I first want to look at everything in this place”.
• Several places have multiple links (in close proximity) that pop up the same detail description. Is that intentional? What’s the purpose of that? I would like the links to change color when I’ve visited them, so that in such a situation, all the links would appear “visited” after I used the first of them, so that I know that I don’t need to bother clicking on the others because they won’t reveal anything new.
• When one detail box leads to another, I would like to have a “back” button that takes me to the previous box I was at, because in some cases it can be unobvious or complicated to figure out how to reach that box again in order to continue exploring where you left off. Or maybe the boxes should appear stacked, so that closing the topmost one will reveal the previous one. (Some of the boxes have a back link in their text, but it would be nice to have an “external” back link that is always there (unless maybe there is a gameplay reason why you shouldn't be able to go back), visually distinct so you can spot it without having to search through the text, and automatically takes you back to where you came from rather than up to a fixed ancestor box.)
  (Now that I think about it, this would be good for locations as well. In fact, I have occasionally had this problem of it not being immediately obvious how to get back where you came from even in the graphical node-based (not real-time-3D) Myst games: You pop into a new location, maybe it turned you a bit, and when you turn around you see nothing or multiple things that look approximately like where you were before. This is an unrealistic, out-of-character problem, an artifact of the discrete world, because when you can move continuously, you also have a contiguous way back in your mind, so I think an equally artificial back button would be an appropriate solution for it.)

[Pavitra]

I would like to see a visual distinction between “look” links (that pop up the description box at the bottom) and “go” links (that take you to some other place). I would often click on a link and be taken by surprise when it took me somewhere else, thinking “hey, I didn’t want to walk away yet, I first want to look at everything in this place”.

This is planned, but not yet implemented.

Several places have multiple links (in close proximity) that pop up the same detail description. Is that intentional? What’s the purpose of that? I would like the links to change color when I’ve visited them, so that in such a situation, all the links would appear “visited” after I used the first of them, so that I know that I don’t need to bother clicking on the others because they won’t reveal anything new.

This might make sense, but there are many cases where it wouldn't work well, such as when those detail descriptions change. Imagine a link that pops up a description of a panel of colored lights; if you flip a switch in another room, causing one of the lights to turn on, should the link for the panel description turn to the "unvisited" color?

When one detail box leads to another, I would like to have a “back” button that takes me to the previous box I was at, because in some cases it can be unobvious or complicated to figure out how to reach that box again in order to continue exploring where you left off. Or maybe the boxes should appear stacked, so that closing the topmost one will reveal the previous one. (Some of the boxes have a back link in their text, but it would be nice to have an “external” back link that is always there (unless maybe there is a gameplay reason why you shouldn't be able to go back), visually distinct so you can spot it without having to search through the text, and automatically takes you back to where you came from rather than up to a fixed ancestor box.)
(Now that I think about it, this would be good for locations as well. In fact, I have occasionally had this problem of it not being immediately obvious how to get back where you came from even in the graphical node-based (not real-time-3D) Myst games: You pop into a new location, maybe it turned you a bit, and when you turn around you see nothing or multiple things that look approximately like where you were before. This is an unrealistic, out-of-character problem, an artifact of the discrete world, because when you can move continuously, you also have a contiguous way back in your mind, so I think an equally artificial back button would be an appropriate solution for it.)

In both of these cases, the main problem is that sometimes you're not supposed to be able to go back. If the door slams shut behind you, locking you in, you shouldn't be able to go "back" to the room you came from. Likewise, text in popups may describe transient states that are no longer applicable once you've clicked away.