[MUD-Dev] Modeling spells/skills as collections of affects

[Matt Chatterley]

On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Michael Hohensee wrote:

> An ugly approach to this problem would be to make all higher level
> functions (like getrand, move_to, attack_this, etc) availible through a
> runtime programming language.  (I suppose this or something similar has
> already implemented, but it'd work better than trying to define the
> effects of new spells before they're written, since it's less limiting.

While the technical implementation of languages and such is way over my
head (and out of my interests - I like to think I'm a designer at heart),
I believe LPC happily achieves this. Or rather, you can make it achieve
it, by having such functions available in your objects.

Spells (my generic term for a skill which is physically applied to achieve
an effect, as opposed to Skills being skills which you have some value or
rating in, whether you can tell what it is or not), are composed of
various 'effects' in this way.

Currently my wizards write them 'freeform' from the code available -
putting together standard spell elements is something fairly desirable,
but not in any great depth (or great depth but poor spread?) so as to be
restrictive to them.

In this vein, we're planning a 'spell inheritable' allowing them to put
together existant component functions, and custom functions of their own
(usually modified combinations of the components), to create spells.

Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
	http://user.itl.net/~neddy/index.html
"Speak softly and carry a big stick." -Theodore Roosevelt