[MUD-Dev] Circumstances & Situations

[Richard Woolcock]

Travis Casey wrote:
> 
> Richard Woolcock <KaVir at dial.pipex.com> wrote:
> 
> >I was hoping to have my movement code work in a 'walkto <x> <y>' type
> >way (I suppose I could add aliases like 'baker' etc), which would move
> >the player automatically at a speed specific to various things until
> >they arrive or someone stops them.  This wouldn't really be quite like
> >you describe, it would be more like:
> >
> >]goto baker
> >You start walking north along the road.
> >[pause for a couple of seconds]
> >You turn to your left, and continue walking along the road.
> >Far ahead you see a pretty young girl.
> >[pause a moment]
> >Just ahead of you, you see a pretty young girl.
> >[pause a moment]
> >To your left you hear the sound of running feet coming towards you.
> >Just ahead of you, a pretty young girl turns to face your direction.
> >You walk past a pretty young girl.
> 
> [rest of example cut]
> 
> >Basically this will only show things in front of you (or you changing
> >directions), and wouldn't spam you with a load of text every time you
> >move.  I am hoping this will help get around the difficulties generally
> >associated with a world 5120x5120 rooms across.  I'm also going to be
> >making combat reach over rooms (at least one room away) - in fact this
> >will be how backstab will work (hit someone in front of you who is
> >facing away from you).
> 
> Personally, I always get the willies when someone talks about only
> showing what's in front of the character on a text-based mud.  This opens
> a large can of worms -- you have to have positions within rooms, an idea
> of how the character is facing, and an arc of vision for the character.
> 
> This sort of thing has always seemed like too much work to me -- you
> pretty much have to keep track of all the position and facing data that
> a graphical mud would need to draw what the character's seeing, and then
> you have to interpret that data and output it as text.  IMHO, if you want
> this sort of detail, it's probably easier to make a graphical mud -- the
> methods for drawing the world so that only things that are in the player's
> line of sight already exist and are fairly simple for the graphical case.

Erm well no, I don't ;)  I use 'rooms' at coord positions, with the assumption
that a 'room' is a section of something - a room, part of a room, part of a
plain, a bit of river, etc.  When I say you can see what is in front of you,
I mean you can see everything in your 'room' as well as everything in the
'room' ahead of you (or two rooms ahead).  Now I agree that this is not the
best solution, but its quite workable and very simple to implement.

KaVir.