Gammon Forum : MUSHclient : General : Toggling "F1, F6 are macros" from within a plugin

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Toggling "F1, F6 are macros" from within a plugin

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Posted by

Nick Gammon Australia (23,158 posts) Bio Forum Administrator

Date

Reply #15 on Fri 05 Nov 2010 08:17 PM (UTC)

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KaVir said:

P.S: On the subject of MUSHclient versions, Nick, you may find this of interest: http://www.godwars2.org/mwi/clients/mushclient

Hmm - that's interesting. I changed the URL to see how popular other clients are. Not as much as MUSHclient it seems. :)

But that is probably because you have quite significant enhancements designed around miniwindows.

And that is also an interesting commentary for those people who argue that MUDs should still have a "text-only" fallback so "anyone can play".

Judging by your figures, you would have about 10 players rather than 200 if you stuck to a text-only mode. I mean, if the extra graphical features aren't that important, why aren't half the players using other clients?

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

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Posted by

KaVir Germany (117 posts) Bio

Date

Reply #16 on Sat 06 Nov 2010 02:34 AM (UTC)

Amended on Sat 06 Nov 2010 02:35 AM (UTC) by KaVir

Message

Nick Gammon said:
The only problem is, if one plugin wants F1 to bring up Help, and another plugin wants F1 to NOT bring up help. Then you are stuck, eh?

True, but that would be the case anyway, even if the changes were permanent. At least with this approach the user only needs to restart MUSHclient to revert back to their old global preferences - they don't need to manually go through the options trying to work out which ones the plugin has changed.

Not perfect perhaps, but it's a definite improvement. Out of curiousity, what would happen if the user opened two MUSHclient sessions (rather than two worlds in a single session) using this approach? Presumably utils.reload_global_prefs() would only update the preferences for the one session that called it?

Nick Gammon said:
Hmm - that's interesting. I changed the URL to see how popular other clients are. Not as much as MUSHclient it seems. :)

But that is probably because you have quite significant enhancements designed around miniwindows.

Well MUSHclient had a clear lead even before I started playing with plugins (it had around the same number of users as the second and third most popular clients combined), but quite a few players have switched over to it in the last 6 months, and the current figure (55.9% of the active players) is about as high as I've ever seen it - so it does still seem to be gaining in popularity.

Nick Gammon said:
And that is also an interesting commentary for those people who argue that MUDs should still have a "text-only" fallback so "anyone can play".

Judging by your figures, you would have about 10 players rather than 200 if you stuck to a text-only mode. I mean, if the extra graphical features aren't that important, why aren't half the players using other clients?

To be honest I've not noticed any real change in the size of my playerbase since introducing the plugin - although admittedly I've not promoted it heavily, other than to existing players, as I don't feel it's quite finished. It's also worth noting that around one third of the MUSHclient users on my mud don't use MSDP, which means they're not using the plugin (the other two thirds are using various different plugins, including a few player-written ones, but I believe most use graphics).

I should also mention that around 14% of my active players use screen readers, and they rely on that text-only fallback. While I'm very much in favour of adding graphical elements, my mud is still primarily text-based, so my target audience will have certain expectations. In my experience it's easier to persuade people to try a client than it is to force them.

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