On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 04:42:04PM -0500, Jeffrey Nowakowski wrote: > > I disagree. There are too many people with bad connections out there. Broadband is here. While a lot of people do have bad connections (including modem-only), I think that most people who try out netrek for the first time will either already be computer-savvy or be at least network game-savvy. If their connections are really that bad, then training them for a couple of hours on their local servers won't go very far in retaining them when they get rewled repeatedly the first time they login to a real server. > You don't want the user's first experience to be a bad one due to a > flakey connection. It's much better to have a local tutorial server > that is rock solid. Any commercially successful game has a localized > version. I don't discount the value of a localized server. I've supported that idea for years. But, I simply don't think that a superb server is going to help the newbie understand how to change the keymap, if they even survive the first 10 minutes of trying to download, install and run the client. > Going to Java is debatable. On the one hand the C code is well > established, but it is also a mess. C is also harder to maintain. > I'm willing to bet there are more converted C++ programmers on this > list than you think. It's not as bad as it used to be. There may be some Java programmers on this list, but I don't see any of the current active developers embracing it. The only possible switch I see is to C++ since it is a superset of C and the transition can be done incrementally, and even that is a fair bit of work. > > I really wish we could try to consolidate our development efforts. > > I've been saying this for years. It's unlikely to happen unless > somebody with enough sway can get everybody to agree on a clear > vision. The biggest problem is time. Nobody with sufficient knowledge of netrek client software seems to have the time to dedicate to this. -- Dave Ahn | ahn at vec.wfubmc.edu | Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Try to live your life so that when you die, you will rejoice and the world will cry. -1/2 jj^2