[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface and who the hell is supposed to be playing, anyway? (Was: PK Again)

[Michael Hohensee]

Shawn Halpenny wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 26 Sep 1997, Michael Hohensee wrote:
> 
> > In <E0xDotA-0004Hx-00 at crucigera.fysh.org>, on 09/24/97
> >    at 08:46 AM, Maddy <maddy at fysh.org> said:
> >
> > >Imagine race X is at war with race Y.  It takes a lot of the fun out
> > >of things, if you can sneak up to race X's headquarters and have a
> > >good listen to what they're all planning for tomorrow.  The way I've
> > >got languages planned out is that each letter maps to another letter
> > >(although I'm probably going to use groups of letters).  If I say
> > >"Hello world" in human, it might appear to an elf as "Ifmmo xpsme".
> >
> > In that case, you may want to give each race a "battle language" as well
> > as their spoken language (idea from Dune).  Otherwise, some clever human
> > could learn to decipher the language based upon everyday conversation or
> > interception of everyday conversation with elves.
> 
> Is this necessarily an undesired thing?  Why should the language be
> unlearnable simply by studying people speaking it?  One of the key words in
> your sentence was "decipher".  Typically, a cipher is just a mapping of
> symbols, and there's no requirement that your language cipher be easy to
> break.  Let them learn it, IMO, but make it suitable complex.  Rearrange
> words, break words in different places, reverse words, etc.
> 

You could do this, but as you get more advanced in the coding, the more
of a delay you introduce.  Besides, some programmer will just take a
decoding program (or write one) for the task, then share it with his
friends.

This isn't necessarily bad, but it does seem to run counter to the
purpose discussed above.

> > Perhaps the battle language could be represented by a short (30-90) list
> > of words that get encoded to something completely random.  These words
> > could be battle specific words, ie: love isn't going to be among them.
> > :)
> 
> "I'd love to kick yer arse 'round this battlefield!"
> 
> What would happen during the parsing process to the words not in the list?

They would be encoded with the standard character by character or set of
characters by set of characters algorithm.  Making it difficult to
determine ahead of time what the difference between the word "attack"
and "retreat" confounds those with the key to your code. :)


> 
> --
> Shawn Halpenny
> 
> "You can't buy the necessities of life with cookies"
>                                     - "Edward Scissorhands"

--
Michael Hohensee       michael at sparta.mainstream.net
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