Resets and repops

[Nathan Yospe]

On Sat, 22 Mar 1997, Adam Wiggins wrote:

:> 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.

There should be a way to override the instinctive behavior. Just enough of
it to nudge the Player, give them a sense of being in the Character.

:> 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.

Does it scroll? That's what I'm struggling to do: create a scrolling
system. So far, what I've got is not capable of scrolling... Though I do
have a few ideas for it I haven't tested yet.

: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.)

I'd appreciate it.

: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.

I do have windowless as an option... and full vt-220 as another option.
But I have not yet tracked down everything. I did get quite a bit from
Robin Carey's NetServe 3.x code.

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Nathan F. Yospe - University of Hawaii Dept of Physics - yospe at hawaii.edu