How does Fogs of Otmoor work?

Fogs of Otmoor is a Web application. There are no downloads, installs, or plugins required to play. You should get an equally good experience from either of the two most common browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer. There are no features that work for only one of these two. However, you do need to have a late model version of your browser of choice for the best experience (i.e. Firefox 1.5 or 2.0, or Internet Explorer 7). We do not test the game on older or less popular browsers, mainly due to time constraints. (We do admit to being partial to Firefox, our development browser. The application may look a bit nicer in Firefox, despite our best efforts...)

All the action in Fogs of Otmoor is driven by the players. That said, there are a few places where AJAX techniques allow the game to update your browser to let you know important information, such as if it is your turn to move. (AJAX, by the way, is just shorthand for "fancy JavaScript programming"). Because of the continuous load AJAX can put on the server, we use it sparingly. In most places you do need to refresh your browser to see what is happening within Fogs of Otmoor.

Since it is a Web application, some things about Fogs of Otmoor should be immediately familiar. For example, the navigation is on the top of the page and the top part of the left hand column. Forms work as you would expect, and while you can plan your moves by highlighting squares, you won't actually move until you hit submit to update the server. On the other hand, there are some parts of the application that are quite different from other Web applications, as you might expect. These more unique areas are covered in the help pages where they are listed by game feature.

Finally, to forestall comments, please keep in mind that although some of Fogs of Otmoor's communications tools may pretend to be email or instant messaging, they are not. The internal messaging systems are specific to the application and really are not meant to be a substitute for actual email and IM. Fogs of Otmoor does make use of email for notifications, but the internal messaging tools are primarily there to aid game play and keep you from needing to pass out your email address or IM handle to everyone you play with.