[MUD-Dev] Re: Recursive look

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 21 Oct 1998 11:34:41 -0700 
David Bennett<ddt at discworld.imaginary.com> wrote:

> On 10/21/98, at 10:06 AM, Holly Sommer wrote:
>> On Wed, 21 Oct 1998, Ling wrote:

>>> And so on.  Would this become annoying?  I think the chances are
>>> it'll probably be an overwhelming yes.

>> Allow me to vocalize a loud "no." :) At least not the special
>> arrival messages.

> This depends on the type of mud.  On heavily role playing muds or
> whatever, the arrival messages often break the atmosphere as
> players do not always stick to things that are in character.  It
> also makes the whole enter/exit thingy more Chaotic.

The problem is not the customised enter/exit messages, the problem
is that the character entering or exiting is generating his own
enter/exit messages.  This is backwards.  IRL you don't tell people
what they are going to see/hear when you enter/leave, they do their
own interpretation.  

What should happen is that the translating character object should
send a message to all the objects that will detect or react to his
translation and *THEY* should then determine how they are going to
represent this state change to their players.  Thus, all the
processing occurs at the point where it is both perceived and acted
upon: at the receiving party.

Of course this is minially N times more computationally expensive
than having the state changing object do all the work, but them's
the apples.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at kanga.nu
(Contractor)                              Internet: coder at kanga.nu
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
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