Resets and repops

[Adam Wiggins]

> :> It calls into question all sorts of free will/action isues for a MUD,
> :> much as my body stealing does, or just straight possession (you are
> :> connected to the body, you can't leave it, but someone else is
> :> controlling it).  The worst thing is that the God then ends up having
> :> to micro-manage the charmed subject to keep him in line as vs the
> :> player's line.
[AW:]
> :Hmmm, could one influence the player more subtley?  Ie, instead of forcing
> :the subject to attack their buddy, how about parsing the buddy's communicati
> :with the charmed person for their name, and replace it with something nasty?
> :Ie, non-charmed guy types:
> :
> :> say hey fred, let's go back to town
> :
> :and the other guy sees:
> :Bob says, 'Hey asshole, let's go back to town.'
[NY:]
> I liiiike it. Genuine enforced roleplaying, by manipulating how a player
> thinks... Hmmm. Consider a player who is portraying a member of an
> agressive species... you have to, if you want to play the Character as a
> pacifist, actually (as is reasonable) countermand your instinctive
> response.
> 
> Craig throws the contents of his mug in your face. Centauran Ale drips
> down your muzzle, matting your fur. You lift yourself out of your chair,
> red spots flashing in front of your eyes. You feel the wood of the chair's
> arms splintering under your claws. One arm flashes out, catching Craig by
> his shirt. This honorless bald worm will pay...
> >calm down
> You get ahold of yourself, relaxing muscles and sheathing claws. Craig
> drops to the floor and starts to crawl away. El'thae taps you on the
> shoulder. "You OK, friend?", it asks.

Right.  Of course, I've found that if you suggest this sort of thing
to 'normal' mud players, they dislike it intensely, because they are
basically loosing control of their character.  I think this is just a
reflection of how muds work right now, though, and stuff like the above
is a perfect way to do 'natural' role-playing - that is, you don't have
to force any Kzin to be quick to anger - they just *are* quick to anger.
If the player doesn't like that, he can play another race, or possibly
try to engage in some sort of meditation rituals to get control of his
natural tendancies.  Hmmm, I wonder - a pacifist race?

> kill el'thae
You just can't bring yourself to attack El'thae.
Instead, you give him a stern talking-to.

> Of course, having a seperate command window (three lines) and text flow
> really helps for this sort of thing. I'm still trying to figure out how to
> make the text flow an actual feed... right now, I've got a single block
> for text, and it gets to the bottom and starts rewriting at the top,
> wiping the two lines below it, similar to the standard unix talk utility.
> Anyone know how to implement, in telnet, a system with a standard text
> feed, but starting four lines above the bottom of the screen? (the bottom
> three lines for commands, and the fourth line for a divider of dashes)

Yeah, we do this.  Although we don't chunk together the messages (no cr/lf's
except to break up natural text blocks) in order to increase readability,
we do have basically three seperate windows.  There is a single status bar
line which replaces the normal mud prompt, and contains things like your
fatigue level, what task you're currently doing, and whatever else you desire
to throw in there.  Everything above this line is the text window, and
everything below it is the command line.  This is user configurable, but
normally you have a single line for text input, leaving screen height - 2
lines availible for text output.
I fooled around with ncurses for a while, trying to get it to work with
descriptors, but it was both hacky and not very quick, so I finally gave
up and just did it with raw vt-100 codes.  (If anyone wants the reference
I used or the even the code let me know, I've posted it to r.g.m.a and
alt.mud.programming before as well.)
As it is we don't even support non-vt100 terminals, which I suppose is a bad
thing.  One of these days I'll put support for 'normal' mud output (ie an
undefined teletype style terminal), but the windowed thing is just soooooo
nice that I'm loathe to actually do so.