[MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions

[J C Lawrence]

On Sun, 27 Sep 1998 17:07:02 -0700 
Caliban Tiresias Darklock<caliban at darklock.com> wrote:


> You're forgetting one of the things that I personally like so very
> much about MUSHes: People can build their own rooms and write their
> own descriptions. Such comparisons and programming of the
> description text are just not accessible to the majority of players
> -- and, in addition, it creates somewhat of a problem if there is a
> way for any arbitrary person anywhere to programmatically determine
> whether someone is a vampire and how old he is. (I realise the 'OOC
> Masquerade' is a foreign concept to most MUDs, and indeed to many
> MUSHes, but WoD games are by nature political and involve high
> levels of intrigue and espionage. Concealing the character's true
> nature is severely important to just about everyone.)

Turn your data model around.  

The standard data model for rooms and the list is that the character
object asks the room, "What can I see?", and the room object returns
the relevant text.  This has obvious security problems with such as
the above.  If however you turn it around to where the rooms always
export the same data (presumably a meta-format) and the character
object then process that locally before forwarding it to the human
player there is no security leak.

Translation:  Don't filter at the room, filter at the character.

Rephrase: Don't put the intelligence in the rooms (or other data
repositories), put the intelligence where the data will be actually
used.

Principle: Never do now what you can put off till later without
penalty.

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