[MUD-Dev] (fwd) Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <336f91e0.15366969 at post.demon.co.uk>, on 04/27/97 
   at 11:05 AM, Raz <muddyraz at mushroom.demon.co.uk> said:

>On Fri, 18 Apr 1997 02:25:31 +0100 (BST), Ling
><K.L.Lo-94 at student.lut.ac.uk> wrote:

>> On Wed, 16 Apr 1997, Shawn Halpenny wrote:

>> > On Apr 10,  6:57pm, clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:

>> > JCL>   >> 3
>> > JCL>   You take the leather satchel,
>> > JCL>
>> > JCL> I currently do this, with caveats for nested compleations, multiple
>> > JCL> character support (multi-playing) and priority interrupts.
> [...]
>> >   Will the parser still be waiting
>> > for a response of 0-3?  Or if a response of anything _not_ 0-3 fails the
>> > get command without notification, executes the just-typed command
>> > [...] and then returns to the base state of waiting for any
>> > command?  I'm leaning toward the latter,
>> 
>> The later for me too.  It's natural after all.  I've been thoroughly
>> annoyed by the MudOS parsing which just prompts me:  Which one?  then
>> forcing me to retype the entire sentence again. 

>I've a feeling I may be in the minority of being an English member of
>the list, so the following may not ring many bells to too many
>people:

I spent 10 years in England; five years living on a yacht bumming up
and down the east coast, mostly around the Colchester/Brightlingsea
area, and the next five years in West Sussex.

>Remember the old, single-player text adventures, particularly the
>later games from Magnetic Scrolls/Rainbird?  Their parser supported,
>to some extent, this sort of command completion quite successfully.

Sinclair Spectrum et al.  Yup.

Yup.  I thought about trying to do something like that and settled
instead for a more pure Infocom approach.  I think most of the
background reasons had more to do with a stylistic distaste for
several of MagScroll's games than how well their parser worked. 
(Hehn.  I liked Infocom games better anyway)

>In fact, the parsers in use by those games back in the eighties and
>running on Spectrums and C64's are far in advance of mainly verb/noun
>systems in the existing MUD codebases.

They are also all single user systems turn based systems, where the
definition of state is extremely distinct and nothing is going to
happen while the user is sitting there at a prompt picking his nose. 
Multi-user realtime systems don't have a lot of that advantage.  The
definition of state is a lot more gray, and that state is highly
unstable dependant on other's realtime actions.

This is not to say that the current state of MUD server parses doesn't
suck large warts, but that's another matter.  Infocom etc had a mssive
advantage to start with.

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
...Honorary Member Clan McFUD -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...