[MUD-Dev] The MLI Project

[Travis Casey]

On Sunday, 22 February 98, Coder wrote:
> On 17/02/98 at 09:04 PM, Travis Casey <efindel at polaris.net> said:

>>In area descriptions, a markup language along the lines of HTML could be
>>used, indicating special text seen only by those with certain abilities. 
>>For objects, extra properties could hold alternative descriptions.  For
>>example, a room description:

>>  The stone walls and floor here are antiseptically clean, in stark
>>  contrast to the rest of the castle. <SMELL 2>There's a faint smell
>>  of ammonia in the air<SMELL 5>, and an undertone of blood beneath
>>  it</SMELL>.</SMELL>  A brass brazier stands in the back left corner.
>>  <INFRAVISION>It still glows with leftover heat, as if it's been used
>>  recently.</INFRAVISION>  <MAGIC>A sudden queasy chill indicates the
>>  remains of a necromantic spell in the center of the room.</MAGIC>

> A problem which has been bugging me in this regard is that while it is
> very easy to handle gradated levels of awareness (such as the increasing
> levels of smell sense in the example), its much more difficult to cleanly
> handle scales where the percieved/reacted-to item is has just such a
> gradated description but which also changes utterly at certain points.

It seems to me that these situations could be handled with an <OR>
operator:

<SMELL 2>A hint of something bitter tingles your nose.<OR SMELL 7>The
room reeks of a bitter substance, with an undertone of citrus.<OR
SMELL 7 AND SKILL "chemistry 6">The room is filled with the scent of
Arbitocal-6.</SMELL>

Of course, the more such options you add, the more complicated the
parser which handles the room descriptions is going to have to be.

> Consider the simple case of a second order balance scale which describes
> the character's vision visa-vis two variables: minimum perceived frequency
> and visible spectrum width.  How could you use such a tagged descritption
> to handle a character the majority of whose visible spectrum lies in the
> infra-red band and who has very little to no visible spectrum in what we
> consider "visible light"?

Now that's getting tougher -- sight is the major sense of humans, so
most descriptions are going to be written with the assumption that the
character can see.  If you're going to allow for characters who have
alternate modes of vision, either a lot of things are going to need
multiple descriptions, or you're going to need a way to automatically
generate descriptions.

> This alligns with the lense concept raised recently -- I like the idea of
> adding perceptics to characters -- but what if those perceptics overwhelm,
> devalue, alter-emphasise or otherwise mutate the perceptions priorities of
> the character away from the norm?

Actually, that's something that I've thought about before.  Races
could have a priority arrangement of senses.

> Bubba may see a normal room lit by a guttering candle, but Boffo with his
> ultra-sonic echo-location and near total myopia outside of the infra-red
> band is nearly blinded by the heat flaring off the candle and searing his
> retinas, buthas an utterly detailed awareness of the spatial
> characteristics of the room.

For each race, each sense would need to have a minimum and a maximum
input level; just like many muds already have light systems where
characters can't see with too little or too much light, characters
with infravision would need to be unable to "infrasee" when there's
too little heat or too much heat, characters wouldn't be able to smell
if there's too little scent or too much, etc.  (Or, alternatively, a
single overly-strong light/smell/whatever may overwhelm all others.)

> Want something a little more "normal".  Boffo now has "magic-vision" which
> displays the magical potentials of all objects in such strength and
> overwhelming detail that their mere visual characteristics are effectively
> lost.

This is where a priority scheme comes in:  if the "magic" sense has
priority over the "sight" sense, the character will only get the
"magic" description for something which has both descriptions.
--
       |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
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