[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc - Combat

[Nathan F Yospe]

On Tue, 5 Jan 1999, James Wilson wrote:

:On Tue, 05 Jan 1999, Koster, Raph wrote:

:>Lots of ways to handle this, of course, some of them more subject to
:>abuse than others. Queuing systems and programmable actions & the like
:>can help with this, of course. But a queuing system loses actual
:>interaction in favor of pre-programmed estimates. Programmable actions
:>are, frankly, only for the expert gamer, which may not be your target
:>audience.

:I'm curious - has anyone implemented a system allowing variable levels of 
:combat detail ('brief-mode' vs 'verbose-mode', for instance)? 

Got something like that in my client, but it's not open, and won't be in
the near future... I've got a big move coming up in May or so. After the
move, some things may show up. No promises at this point. In any case...

The client has two levels of information screening: server detail level,
and display detail level. The first relates to bandwidth, but the second
is for exactly this sort of thing. Certain information will be described
in 7 modes: "minimal", "sparse", "simplified", "standard", "interested",
"detailed", and "exacting". These modes are autoscaled by attention, and
tend to focus rather highly on combat when it is first person; a fight a
character is endangered by goes up to exacting instantly... but this can
be manually overridden. I'm not sure what changes I'm going to make with
the manual override... I don't care for it much... but this is one thing
that makes me consider leaving it.
--

Nathan F. Yospe - Born in the year of the tiger, riding it forever after
University of Hawaii at Manoa, Dept of Physics, second year senior (joy)
(On Call) Associate Algorithm Developer, Textron Systems Corp, Maui Ops.
yospe#hawaii.edu http://www2.hawaii.edu/~yospe Non commercial email only