Skinning the main client

I'm going to annoy you with this, but I think it would be nice to have the whole thing skinable, though to be fair I probably wouldn't use it to it's full potential. Perhaps it might be worth just doing the board at this stage (so that you can at least get a few hours sleep a night...) then looking at the whole blessed assemblage later. Tho of course that'd mean you'd still have this huge chunk on the 2do list that you couldnt get the satisfaction of ticking.

I feel kind of ungrateful demanding features, when you're giving this to us for free, so up to you really. Just my 2p...

Mr S

Well, I intend that the user can set properties like font size, colour, face, transparency and style, in any widow, including the main one.

I may allow the main window to be "self-skinned", so you can specify a background, sound files for chat entry/exit, etc. Because of limitations in java, though (it can't access files on your local machine, or any other machine other than the server you downloaded it from), these will need to be stored on the server.

Skinning is anyther kettle of fish, though: it's where you play against someone and they've bought the fancy-schmancy Uberboard of Kingsgame Shininess, and you get to see that too. You will always have the option NOT to view the skin they play with, but there's little point buying a skin if your opponent can't see it too, so by default, you will view the skin your opponent has selected: you can instead switch to one of your own purchased skins, or any of the default free skins.

We're hoping that where people have bought expensive RL boards online, they will automatically be able to play on a skin depicting their board, too.

We won't ever charge for playing, the client is open source, and we enthusiastically help anyone trying to make alternative clients to connect to the server, so we can't charge for things that are completely clientside. The ONLY things we can charge for are value-adds that we control from the server: stuff like, as we're discussing here, the skins your opponent sees.

Which of these we actually end up charging for depends on a lot of stuff, not least our own morality. I don't want people to be able to buy invasive powers like the ability to watch a game in progress ("voyeur" function), unless both players know that it's being done, and agree to it. Heck, even admins won't get that! I'm also not really comfortable with the ability to be a voyeur in a game.

Charging for the ability to speak as a voyeur might be doable, as might charging for the ability to add comments to the savegame (maybe only paying users can add comments even to their own games? Or maybe only they can download past games of other users? Or... something?). We can charge for league tables and other data mining. We can charge for portrait slots. We might even allow people to create their own unique skins that nobody else can buy, though these would need to be reviewed for PGness. We could allow paying members to download a logof the chats they've been in, though that brings in a whole slew of privacy issues, so maybe not.

Portrait slots and skins are the ones I've the least qualms about, so they're being done first: they're pretty, and they add nothing beyond that prettiness, so people should hopefully not be upset if they don't have them for free.

So far, every bit of work I've done on thudgame will always be available to people for free.

Once we have paid memberships, other functions will most likely be available to paid members first, then may be opened to the public once we've found and fixed all the bugs.

That we need to make some money somewhere is vital, though: I've hit my overdraft limit, I can't use my bank card, I'm working every day on Thud, and I want it to support me so I can keep carrying on developing it. I think before it'll support me fully, I'll probably need to get a parttime job for some time, though.

Any ideas from anyone, about making money without alienating the players, are always greatly appreciated!

Whilst I don't expect it'd support you completely, it might be worth having some means through which people can send donations, especially before there's anything people can pay for. I imagine tho that most places that deal with cash online, however it's generated, charge you some sort of fee, so I'm wondering whether it'd be worth creating a sourceforge project for thud - although it's not the first sort of project you'd think of for SF, I can't think of a reason why you shouldn't be able to, and their donation scheme charges seem to be pretty fair (and are taken as a percentage of each donation, so there's no way it could end up costing you more than it brings in). Tho of course if you can find somewhere free it'd be even better.

Mr Scrub

PS AFAIC the "self-skinning" concept for the client sounds good - I'm fairly persuaded by your points that there'd be no benefit in having "full" skinning on there.

One other thing that might merit looking at is that the whatisreal and lifecod forum styles show ads, but phpBBlite and SubSilver don't seem to - you're probably only missing out on a few pence on that, since I expect most page hits are either guests (who therefore can't use any style other than the default whatisreal) or users who either prefer one of the styles that do show ads or simply haven't delved deeply into their profile settings, so havent changed from whatisreal. Certainly I doubt if anyone other than me choses to use SubSilver - so boring, but I'm always looking to squeeze an extra bit of speed out of my setups.

Mr S

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