5
Nov
I often find myself asking the question, ‘What is innovation?’, the actual definition is ‘The act of introducing something new.’ which is as unhelpful as it could possibly be. Innovation to me is the act of creating something that breaks out of the boundaries of what exists already.. But is that always possible?
My main project over the last couple of weeks has specifically been the mail system, arguably one of the most important features of any game, the home of communication and team work, bringing people together for the common good of the galaxy, as simple as this may sound, it is indeed no small task.
I’ve done a lot of research into the matter, and created several prototypes each behaving in entirely different ways, I’ve tried the ‘Split Panel’ approach (the concept of clicking on a mail and reading it immediately below), I’ve tried threading views with a full collapsing tree of Subject -> Replies -> Mail, I’ve tried ‘New Window’ techniques, and all of them with their own distinct benefits have quite a few flaws as well.
I’ve reviewed 10 different mail clients (some harder to uninstall than others!), 15 different mail websites, eventually realising that simplicity is best, the easiest mail clients to use had very simple yet powerful interfaces. For Shadow Wars we aren’t looking for folder views, extensive filtering systems, multiple window reading or sophisticated spam management, we’re looking for a very simple read and reply system.
This got me turning back to the previous DarkGalaxy system, excluding the bugs, this was a reasonable solution, and can be easily tweaked and improved to fit a new game. Add styling to easily determine read from unread, attach the ‘Notifications’ as mentioned in my previous blog post, include some nice features like simple BB Code for formatting, mail forwarding etc. And you have a powerful mail client.
Innovation is a powerful word, it conjures up thoughts of creativity and stepping outside the box, but on a few occasions after doing the research and demos, you may feel that you’re standing a few miles from said box, when it wasn’t a bad box to start with!
Posted Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Filed Under Category: Uncategorized
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and do you really need so many words to say that? Anyway maybe you could think of something new that is usefull and cool without using the standard stuff you see on all the pages nowaday 
(mail redirection would be usefull 
And you are right that most stuff you can find on the net is too much and not usefull for a game like dg was and shadow wars might be 
If you placed a window at the top of the screen (minnimized) that said message, and used color to let the player know that a message was waiting, then all the player would have to do is to expand the message screen, to read any new messages that were recieved.
Cova Lue