What's in your toolbox?

[Ramblurr]

One advantage a browser-based client would give you is ease of updating. Forcing the player to dl every build can get old, real fast. On the other hand, being able to offload some of the data-store can be a blessing.

Indeed, this is a headache. Though, I thought it would be fun to implement a binary patching system akin to the way Google pushes chrome updates. When the users open the app, it phones home to check for an update, then automatically updates itself with a binary patch. This would be a fun challenge to implement, but probably overkill for a simple game client.

Have you played with jQuery much? It adds a great deal to the front end and combined with AJAX (which it supports natively for quick and dirty trips to the server) makes for a very smooth transition.

Yes. JQuery and similar toolkits (Dojo) are fantastic. If I was to create a webapp it would definitely make full use of AJAX give it a native app feel.

I think players respect applications running in a browser that look like they are part of the 21st century, but tend to think less of those that are static HTML with full screen refreshes every time a tiny piece of the display is updated. Unfortunately a lot of PBeMs have websites that look very 90's. Take a look at Rolling Thunder.

I absolutely agree. I've ranted about this elsewhere on these forums. Most PBEM sites made a website in the late 90s when the web as new and never bothered to update it. FBI is another major culprit.

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I am playing in Ramblurr's Far Horizons: The Awakening, right now. Being able to send and receive my turn orders and turn results via e-mail is an enormously attractive feature to me. It's still early in the game, right now, and of all aspects of the game that I have yet encountered, the sending and receiving of turn orders and turn results via e-mail is the single most attractive feature of the game for me, to date.

Don't worry, this won't be going away. I don't plan to discard the email/orders interface, but build a graphical interface on top of the orders interface (whether that interface will be a downloadable app or webapp is TBD). But, I will definitely keep supporting email+orders.