Using Evennia to send data to a graphical client

[Ashlan]

I had this idea wherein, since online games basically send streams of text data to graphical clients, could/should Evennia be repurposed to do this?

For example, imagine you enter a room. The room name provides a tileset description code, like forest tileset. The room description contains grid information that defines accessible areas. The who is here description provides the coordinates of other players in the "room". Most of this is not easily human readable but if your web client or telnet program translates that into visual data, boom you've got a graphical game.

This all seems a little too easy though and not what Evennia was intended for. Am I missing something or could this work?

[Brian Durney]

I'm interested in making Evennia games that work with a standard text client but can also work with graphical clients. As I understand it, the best way to do what I want to do is to use out-of-band (OOB) communication for the information that isn't intended for the text client. I remember seeing tutorials or other documentation about OOB communication in the past, but when I looked for it just now I couldn't find it.

[BlauFeuer]

https://github.com/evennia/evennia/wiki/OOB needs some updating, but the general idea is there.

For example, to send an image URL that only the web browser sees (not text clients), the code is
        object.msg(image=['https://raw.githubusercontent.com/evennia/evennia/'
                        'master/evennia/web/website/static/website/images/evennia_logo.png'])

Using the msg method this way, you could send your list of tiles:
        object.msg(tiles=['right-T', 'forest1', 'roundabout2', 'left corner', 'street end', 'castle wall north/south', ...]

[Tim Ashley Jenkins]

I've already done some experimenting with this, using the built-in websocket functionality in the video game creation software Construct 2 and OOB communication to cue graphic and sound triggers! Here's a demonstration: http://i.imgur.com/yS5Kk38.gifv

But the gist is: if you program the client and the server behavior to work together, you can achieve a lot with Evennia, including mini maps, server-controlled special effects, even up to a whole graphical MMO if you want to get really ambitious.

[Ashlan]

Nice man, looks impressive!

[Griatch Art]

The OOB wiki page is to be removed and should be referenced anymore. OOB in Evennia is these days no different to how regular text is sent. See https://github.com/evennia/evennia/wiki/Messagepath for more details of sending custom data between Evennia and your client.
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Griatch