[MUD-Dev] Re: Recursive look

[Marc Hernandez]

On Wed, 21 Oct 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:

}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.

	This brings up an interesting notion I was thinking about
regarding sending messages in muds.  What I was thinking about was that
instead of having the 'interface' to sending the client a simple 
sendText(clientID,"text") it could be based on a .. token system.  
	There would be a set of tokens that would represent things
(nouns/verbs probably).  To send something to the client you would then
say something like:
sendClient(clientID,tok_Leave(tok_Living(bob)));  Then the sendClient
function would take care of stringing things together and making sentances
out of them.  
	The nice thing about it is that you could have something at
sendClient that could manipulate messages in a logical manner since it
would then be a function of legal operations on tokens, instead of parsing
a passing string and figuring out some of this stuff.  The tokens can be
well defined, unlike english.  
	Implemented correctly it could provide flexability without a
reduction in expressive power.  Since humans would be generating the
semantics it should be possible.  
	You could have 'objects' that could have modifiers attached like
weight(1500lbs).  When you get the above 'sendClient' message it could
either send some usual message or it could look up a modifier and modify
the sentance with that (Bob, the lumbering giant, left west).  
	And NPC's could intercept the messages :-).

}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.

	Also with the above system you could in theory defer
interpretation until the tokens reach a client (perhaps there could be a
light client for people that NEED to telnet in).  

	Just some ramblings.

Marc Hernandez		marc at eisoftware.com
Programmer		www.eisoftware.com