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

[Chris Gray]

[Raz:]
[details of example deleted]
:The above seems to be a generally smooth handling of that particular
:situation. Obviously, nicer interaction could be passed to the two
:participants - the parser could respond to the male human in the last
:instance "The big bag was just taken by the female human, take the small =
:one
:instead?" or, better, offer this prompt the instant the female takes the
:bag.

In order to do that, the system is going to have to know that there is
a prompt pending on the first player, and that the second player's action
has an affect on the status involved in that prompt. You are deep into
semantics here, and far beyond what is just "parser" work. I don't doubt
that you could come up with a sequence of steps that would be able to
work out any situation we could come up with. However, the effort required
to implement such solutions could be very large, and could require some
very detailed interactions between the entire semantic base of your
system, and the "parser". I guess its your choice as to whether or not
the result is worth all that effort. For me, its not. I will also point
out that as a player, I'm not at all sure I would be comfortable with
such suspended commands hanging around like that - I would hope there
would be a way to tell the system to never ask me questions like that,
and to just fail commands that fail.

:And because the parser doesn't/shouldn't *require* a particular response
:from the player, you can just as easily respond 'yes' or 'no', give up =
:and
:wander off, or pull out your sword and stick it through the pesky woman's
:ribs.

OK, but then you have to somehow decided that some semantic action of
the player is such that it silently cancels the outstanding state of
the question. Do you allow any user-level programming of objects, etc?
If so, how do you make sure that everything that should affect such
outstanding states does do so?

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA