WorldForge Community

I'm a fan of pop-ups. Menu's that allow you a level of control. I've found that while direct short cuts are OK there are problems. I've ended up picking up houses, eating the pig and boots and other interesting mistakes. A set of properly structured pop-up has value in terms of what it tells you. "Are you sure" "when you do this you must be standing X metres from a tree" etc. Instructions make for fast player learning and fewer help posts. Having a pop-up crafted for each event is to much work but a few for key events, particularly those that can go wrong will help.
A pop-up system also provides much more functionality per key. "P" can mean many things.
We could also craft a pop-up that goes between the player and the code. That's common in Second Life and Active Worlds both of which allow player generated new actions and objects without the player needing to master any code. I notice the lack of menu's is a Linux/FOSS characteristic. Its created by coders who don't see the need. If FOSS is to be big or bigger than the others, It needs to develop more menu's for non coders like me. Of course I may have just missed a download but that too is a problem. Getting started pages written by programmers who don't know how unintelligible their jargon is is the bane of my life. Microsoft employs hundreds of people to translate the jargon into sensible language or easy buttons. The catch being that at that point they create a door for the hackers.
We have the Inventory pop-up, Control menu, and the system/ chat menu.
[list]We need a trade menu so we can do more complex trade. And don't need to worry if the pig pens empty. (I still have not figured out Mr Blacken Decker.)
We need a what's this function. Select an item and get its name [and details if any].
We need a software crafting menu that allows us to craft other pop-ups, test them in a sandbox area and 'mail' them to a code bank for checking and implementation.
A generic combat menu is also possible.[/list:u] I'll do a separate post on each.