[MUD-Dev] Circumstances & Situations

[Travis Casey]

Richard Woolcock <KaVir at dial.pipex.com> wrote:

>I was hoping to have my movement code work in a 'walkto <x> <y>' type
>way (I suppose I could add aliases like 'baker' etc), which would move
>the player automatically at a speed specific to various things until
>they arrive or someone stops them.  This wouldn't really be quite like
>you describe, it would be more like:
>
>]goto baker
>You start walking north along the road.
>[pause for a couple of seconds]
>You turn to your left, and continue walking along the road.
>Far ahead you see a pretty young girl.
>[pause a moment]
>Just ahead of you, you see a pretty young girl.
>[pause a moment]
>To your left you hear the sound of running feet coming towards you.
>Just ahead of you, a pretty young girl turns to face your direction.
>You walk past a pretty young girl.

[rest of example cut]

>Basically this will only show things in front of you (or you changing
>directions), and wouldn't spam you with a load of text every time you
>move.  I am hoping this will help get around the difficulties generally
>associated with a world 5120x5120 rooms across.  I'm also going to be
>making combat reach over rooms (at least one room away) - in fact this
>will be how backstab will work (hit someone in front of you who is
>facing away from you).


Personally, I always get the willies when someone talks about only
showing what's in front of the character on a text-based mud.  This opens
a large can of worms -- you have to have positions within rooms, an idea
of how the character is facing, and an arc of vision for the character.

This sort of thing has always seemed like too much work to me -- you 
pretty much have to keep track of all the position and facing data that
a graphical mud would need to draw what the character's seeing, and then
you have to interpret that data and output it as text.  IMHO, if you want
this sort of detail, it's probably easier to make a graphical mud -- the
methods for drawing the world so that only things that are in the player's
line of sight already exist and are fairly simple for the graphical case.

A simpler, but similar, idea would be this:  simply give players who are
"walking through" a room on their way to somewhere else a briefer, less
detailed description.  Those who are willing to move along one room at a 
time the old way will get more description, but it will also take them
longer to get where they're going.
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