[MUD-Dev] Re: npc memory and reactions

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 09:00 AM 9/5/98 -0400, I personally witnessed James Wilson jumping up to
say:
>
>Another possibility is that Tom's coming into sight sends just
>one event, "Here's Tom", to Zeke, and then it is Zeke's job to 
>inspect Tom for the swastika. This way, viewers don't get any
>information they don't ask for; conversely, Zeke will have to
>scan every object that comes into sight, rather than simply 
>waiting for a 'you see swastika' event.

I would care quite a bit if someone were wearing a swastika on a MUD, but I
would never think to register an interest in it. I would be quite unable to
fathom the existence of any measurable likelihood that someone would wear
one, and therefore even if the thought occurred to me I would be unlikely
to define any sort of event related to that possibility. 

There's also a problem related to what exactly a swastika *is*. We all
remember the movie 'V', in which the visitors' symbol looked very much like
a swastika but most definitely was not a swastika; although it was a
'not-swastika', the red/white/black coloration of the flag and the general
shape of the symbol *suggested* a swastika. This sort of thing almost
demands a graphical MUD, because transferring such information textually is
just not feasible, but then you have this problem of scanning and
interpreting huge amounts of data, and people who will use various tricks
of the human eye to create effects that a machine's precision will see as
'noise'. The stereographic noise effect of the "Magic Eye" books is a
perfect example; while a machine can generate this effect quite easily
(some graphics programs are preconfigured with a filter that does so),
reversing the effect is nearly impossible. 

Some of these effects are also achieved by exploiting bugs in the software
or limitations of the hardware; the color "lavendar" (sic) in Netscape is a
sort of pretty blue-green. If Netscape ever fixes this, that color will be
much more difficult to reproduce on a web page, requiring a hex color code.
(The obvious solution, if you ask me, is to spell it right next time and
leave the misspelling in as an undocumented feature for backward
compatibility. Yeah, I know, that really does put the "backward" in
backward compatibility, but hey.) A lot of graphics programs achieved
fantastic psychedelic patterns in the early days of VGA by exploiting the
way most monitors exhibited moire patterns on large fields of color, and
the way such patterns manifested when alternating single-pixel lines of two
different colors were drawn. Those programs don't work so well on most
modern monitors, although if you have a high-end monitor with a big
confusing user interface you can often adjust the moire setting and make it
look like it did way back in the day. 

>If there is also a mechanism
>for transmitting memories from NPC to NPC (possibly distorting
>them along the way) this could be quite a nice system.


This seems like the "right" way to do things, if you ask me. Zeke can pass
on the information he has, but someone who has never met Tom has no access
to that information.

>'Tom saves' has the advantage that it can be implemented very
>simply by just adding a new slot or property to 'the Tom object',
>which other anti-nazis can then check quite easily. 

But Zeke's opinion of Tom is a property of Zeke, not a property of Tom. To
treat it otherwise is just Wrong.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban at darklock.com>   | "I'm not sorry or 
Darklock Communications <http://www.darklock.com/> |  ashamed of who I 
PGP Key AD21EE50 at <http://pgp5.ai.mit.edu/~bal/> |  really am."      
FREE KEVIN MITNICK! <http://www.kevinmitnick.com/> |  - Charles Manson