[MUD-Dev] Re: regulating player-created objects

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 6 May 1998 16:36:27 -0500 (CDT) 
Dan Shiovitz<dbs at cs.wisc.edu> wrote:

> (On a vaguely related note, what are the people who are planning on
> non-disappearing characters (ie, when you quit, your characters
> stays in the game world) doing about telling the player what went on
> since they were last there? 

I create a logfile of all the IO that they would have received if they
had been logged in.  I also allow simple pattern searches (grep
actually) of that log for interesting items.

As this log can get large, I currently trim it to the last RL day.
The hope was that time travel would allow accounting for the rest.

> I guess if you support the database-replay thing you could just
> print out exactly what happened, but that might be a lot of screen
> scroll if they were gone for a long time. 

Quite.

> Maybe some way to summarize the info? "While you were gone, nothing
> much happened. You continued your research into Air Magic." or
> "While you were gone, a bunch of angry orcs invaded your tower and
> burned it to the ground. You barely escaped with your life, went to
> a tavern to drown your sorrows, and the next thing you knew you were
> in bed with a tavern wench and a nasty case of VD.")

<ponder>

As I already support scripted behaviour for characters while logged
out, I can easily imagine such scripts inserting lines into the log to 
be later preferentially extracted to create a potted summary of the
past events.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

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MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.