JavaScript and Nexus

Eladrian

As someone who routinely uses JavaScript and is much more familiar with it than LUA (and who would like to take every opportunity to reinforce those skills), are there any huge disadvantages to using Nexus that I should be aware of if I'm happy to code up everything myself?

Thanks in advance for any responses.

Tetchta

Small correction here, it's actually not "LUA," it's L.U.A.

Aside from that, the main problem with Nexus is it runs in a browser, and as a result is prone to lag and slowdown. You also have limited customization with the GUI. It's definitely not bad though.

edit: There's pros and cons as well aside from performance, like Nexus being automatically saved to the cloud. But on the other hand, you're going to essentially have no community support when it comes to diagnosing problems because pretty much nobody works on Nexus. But if that doesn't dissuade you, I say go for it!

Eladrian

I think the amount of GUI customization should be good for me. I've been reading on the Achaea forums, and I think I can figure out how to populate the tabs with whatever I'd personally like displayed.

The lag and slowdown isn't crippling, though, if you want to be competitive in PVP?

And my other concern is, will not having access to Mudlet Mapper throw any big hurdles in my path to being a serious PVPer? It's hard for me to gauge how important it is to things like chasing when I have no experience with Aetolia's combat, but I guess I was wondering about that, too.

Tetchta

I'm not super sure about the mapper exactly, to be honest, but I know some people PVP on nexus just fine. I'm sure actual experts will be able to give you better answers, but iirc Aetolian PvP is more about good routes and reactions to situations more than it is latency/processing speed.

Jiri

I suspect you may run into performance issues in large fights, though when the game is doing the lagging Mudlet is affected as well. This may also depend on your scroll back level (how far you can look back on previous lines) and where/how you have logging set up.

As for mapping, while the in-game pathing is inferior to the Mudlet mapper it is probably the best one in an IRE game. It's very usable and you can eventually write scripts to help dash/sprint/do neither a bit more intelligently than the pathing system will. Since the game is very open about room numbers you can keep a local table of locations you would like to path to that the pather won't recognize natively.

From a technical perspective:

- Instead of creating trigger chains (one trigger leads to another, and this can be repeated) or multi-line triggers (the trigger expects lines in a particular order and a particular range) natively on Mudlet you will need to use local variables to enable/disable triggers for the same purpose. This will be a bit inconvenient and possibly lead to race conditions but maybe someone with more Nexus experience can correct me here.

- As Tetchta said, you will not have many people around that can help you with technical programming questions. That said, I don't think you'll need many data structures to implement a system for Nexus. As long as you understand how lists and objects work and can iterate through them you'll be spending much more time learning game mechanics than reading Javascript references. Your only disadvantage here is that these things have already been implemented in Sunder and whichever less-public Mudlet systems people have access to.

Ultimately, it's a matter of whether your interest in using Javascript is worth the dozens of hours it will take to make scripts from scratch or find a benevolent soul who has written a system for Nexus. Personally though I wouldn't invest too heavily until you can get in some big group fights and see how your performance is.

Eladrian

I'm quite familiar with JavaScript already, and I'm more than willing to figure out how to build all my own stuff. It is starting to sound like slowdown in large group fights might be the biggest hurdle to being a successful combatant, though, and it'd be a shame to invest too much time into things only to find that I'm really hampered by that.

But I am willing to put up with some performance issues in big battles as long as I still feel competitive. If anyone else with experience in this could comment on that, I'd be really appreciative

Tetchta

@Ayuna uses nexus for PvP so she might be a great person to weigh in.

Teani

I don't use Mudlet mapper, even though I use Mudlet, and I'm one of the top explorers. The in-game map works just fine for most things.