From: terence@bronco.ece.cmu.edu (Terence Chang)
Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek
Subject: Re: New Features? Netrek Community?  Is that you TERENCE?
Date: 14 Apr 92 03:07:49 GMT
Distribution: rec
Organization: Carnegie Mellon University

In article <IVAN.92Apr13175726@haldane.bu.edu> Ivan Vazquez <ivan@haldane.bu.edu> writes:
>So when you play color you get to see the planet owner from the color.
>Great.  That's super.  But when you play monochrome you lose big
>because if you want to see what is on planets AND see their owner, you
>have to keep switching modes.
>
>I really think this should be corrected, not so much because I think I
>should be getting a better deal then everyone else, but because I
>would like to get the SAME deal as everyone else.  

The original client used to do a pretty good job on monochrome displays,
assuming that your font, italicfont, and boldfont were all reasonably
different looking.  Planets you own should be in bold, friendly/neutral ones
in italics, and enemy ones in the regular font.

The only machine that I play from, bronco, has a DEC X11R4 (formerly X11R3)
server.  As Jonathan Hardwick has noted, there is no longer a "6x10I" or
anything similar available.  I've found that "6x9" is reasonable (though
it's weird to see friendly planets/teammates listed in a smaller font than
enemies...doesn't mesh with the use of boldface).  Just today I found clI6x12
which would be *perfect* if only the font claimed to be 10 pixels high
instead of 12 (there's lot of white space above/below the characters).  I was
tempted to hack the client to ignore the italicfont height and stick with 10
pixels (maybe the font can be hacked, I'm not sure).

["xset q" should list the directories that fonts live in]

>I suppose the way to get these types of things is to send Terence some
>nice mail with the suggested patch to the latest release of the
>client, but wait, the latest UDP client sources have been released,
>but are they the same as the latest bronco client?

There is no definitive client source.  I have used my current bronco sources
(mostly the vanilla scam sources with bug fixes and X11 citizen stuff; I
know there are better sources out there than mine) to create a blessed
DECstation UDP client binary, but that's all I can do without access to
other platform types.

>Terence, how do you feel handling these types of requests anyway?

Generally I don't touch the client at all -- it's too much of a pain to
compile it for the prevalent architectures out there (MIPS RISC, Sun 4, Sun
3, NeXt, MIPS RS, Sequent, VAX, Apollo, SGI, i386/486) and try to protect
the integrity of the "blessed" reserved.c at the same time.  Also, I know
very little about X programming and probably wouldn't do a good job on any
graphical interface change.

[ Actually there's a lot you can teach yourself by getting to know the
server/client sources (and reading lots of man pages) -- TCP/IP sockets,
shared memory, IPC, signals, hairy syscalls, process management, some X
fundamentals, synchronization, code optimization, shell scripts -- a lot of
my experience with these concepts comes directly from Netrek (scary
thought).  I'm not a Unix or C wizard... not even a computer scientist.  But
I do enjoy tweaking the server, as long as the balanced mechanics of the
game aren't disrupted. ]

I don't get many suggestions.  It's difficult for players to tell what the
client does (and therefore is set in stone) and what the server does; I'm
sure it's frustrating to keep hearing how infeasible some obvious things are
to do -- like snaz up the wait queue to display who's on the queue to all
other players.  But if it's feasible and reasonbly easy to do (for example,
displaying planets taken/armies bombed for the current session, or ignoring
messages from other players), I'll be happy to add it in.

Terence
-- 
"People who get nostalgic      |  Terence Chang:
 about childhood were          |    e-mail: terence@bronco.ece.cmu.edu
 obviously never children."    |            or an acceptable facsimile thereof
       -- "Calvin and Hobbes"  |            (subject to change w/o notice)