For the most part Avalon has suited me fine but after spending tons of time trying to get out of rooms with "hidden" doors or trying to figure out the correct way to ask an NPC about or for something, I've given up on Avalon and am now using a separate not-so-great windows laptop for Gemstone, and if I go back to my mac to play Gemstone it will only be in a sandbox running windows so I can have Stormfront. The lack of links can make game play, especially in newer areas with more complicated NPCs and room descriptions, extremely frustrating. Updating Avalon with clickable links like in SF, or else rolling out a Mac FE that's more like SF would fix this particular issue with a lot of us mac users.

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arulisse.tumblr.com

>>I've given up on Avalon and am now using a separate not-so-great windows laptop for Gemstone

Just tragic! Interestingly enough, for another project I just revisited StormFront's performance on the Mac platform under WINE. And the current WINE build handles the SF front-end much better than my last experience. The jittery, laggy update problem seems to have been overcome. More testing might be required to be sure - but the net take-away is: You probably don't need to use a separate laptop or a sandbox implementation of Windows on Mac anymore to use SF!

Basically, if you use LICH, you're mostly set up. And if you don't, the set up isn't terribly challenging to overcome for SF / WINE / Mac, but there are a couple of potential intricacies. Check it out! And if you need a spot of assist, let me know.

At least, until we can get Avalon updated to 'layout' like Wizard, and handle XML link parsing like SF. And maybe scripting (the regex stuff), then the Avalon FE would rule the world!

Doug