Re: Monster damage indicators.

[Jason Venner <jason@idiom.com>]

You could have a set of different glyphs for the monsters, or have a
set of overlay tiles that are stippled into the rendering for damaged
monsters.

As part of the response to the client, the server could encode the
%damaged information and the client could then select an applicable
rendering mechanism.

>  -- using template mhl.format --
> Date:    28 Nov 1994 19:27:27 EST
> To:      crossfire@ifi.uio.no
> 
> From:    Preston.F.Crow@Dartmouth.EDU (Preston F. Crow)
> Subject: Re: Monster damage indicators.
> 
> From crossfire-request@ifi.uio.no  Mon Nov 28 16: 52:10 1994
> Reply-To: preston.crow@dancer.dartmouth.edu
> 
> > The other problem I se with adding those indicators has to deal with
> >new client/server.  Printing those out will probably flood the link
> >even worse than what happens right now (plan for the present attacks
> >is to buffer them up, and print them out in bunches (ie, 15 times you
> >hit beholder hard).
> 
> This brings up something I've always wondered...
> 
> For the client/server, why is anything being sent as ASCII?  You could
> probably have most standard text strings built in to the client, so you
> only have to tell it to print string number 17017.  If all commands are
> encoded in a 16-bit enum, this means 4 bytes per hit response, regardless
> of the message to be printed.
> 
> Of course, this means that you need to deal with translating between
> endian formats, but that's not too hard to incorporate into the
> networking code.
> 
> If we are serious about playing over low bandwidths, ASCII needs to go.
> 
> --PC
>